EEOC: Burgeoning Workload Calls for New Approaches (Testimony, 05/23/95,
GAO/T-HEHS-95-170).

By law, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) must accept
every charge of employment discrimination.  Today, however, EEOC is
burdened with a growing and aging inventory of pending charges.  In
addition, because employees are more aware of their rights and the
number of nondiscrimination laws is sizeable, EEOC faces a growing
inflow of new charges.  To handle this workload, EEOC would need a large
number of new staff--an unlikely development given the current
environment of budgetary constraints.  EEOC's new Chairman recognizes
this dilemma.  He has discontinued EEOC's long-standing policy of fully
investigating every charge in favor of a policy that targets
investigative resources on the basis of the strength of the evidence of
discrimination behind discrimination claims.  He also directed EEOC to
provide selected cases an opportunity to attempt settlement through
mediation before resorting to the traditional charge process.  Although
it believes that these are steps in the right direction, GAO doubts that
these efforts alone can solve EEOC's charge-processing problem.
Instead, it may be time for EEOC, with the help of Congress and others,
to reexamine its mission and how it is carried out.

--------------------------- Indexing Terms -----------------------------

 REPORTNUM:  T-HEHS-95-170
     TITLE:  EEOC: Burgeoning Workload Calls for New Approaches
      DATE:  05/23/95
   SUBJECT:  Employment discrimination
             Investigations by federal agencies
             Civil rights law enforcement
             Agency missions
             Human resources utilization
             Litigation
             Prioritizing
             Fair employment programs
             Agency proceedings
             Information processing operations

             
------------------------------------------------------------------------

We regret that electronic text of GAO Testimony is not available at 
this time. 

See the GAO FAQ - Section 2.0 for printed copy ordering information.
The FAQ is automatically retrieved with all WAIS search results or 
can be obtained by sending e-mail to: [email protected]