Report 2013-102 Recommendations

To improve the quality of the performance reporting it submits to Labor, the department should work with Labor to develop reasonable controls to avoid reporting overstated and inaccurate performance measures.

To improve the department's performance on its negotiated goals, it should, by January 2014, ensure that all veterans employment representatives are fully trained to use the new version of CalJOBS.

To improve the department's performance on its negotiated goals, it should, through its governance council, regularly assess whether its actions under the 100-day plan are improving performance on the three common measures.

To identify ways to better serve veterans in California, the department should assess the success or struggles of veterans within demographic categories in finding employment, such as age, race, or educational attainment, by comparing veterans' performance to that of nonveterans in the same demographic categories and across demographic categories and use this analysis to determine whether specific populations of veterans could be better served through more targeted efforts and to identify best practices for improving employment outcomes for these specific populations. Further, the department should provide the results of this analysis annually, beginning in 2014, to stakeholders, including local workforce agencies, the state workforce board, the interagency council, the Legislature, and the public.

To ensure that it is using its limited resources effectively, the department and its information division should develop and implement, by July 2014, a means to receive and analyze feedback from workforce branch staff and from local workforce agencies to determine whether they have ideas for improving the employment outcomes for veterans. Specifically, the feedback method should include a means of identifying whether the staff in the field are accomplishing the department's veteran-specific objectives and whether the tools being used—such as labor information reports and the Vocations for Vets publications—can be made more useful and effective.

To better optimize its leadership role in the interagency council's employment workgroup, the department should ensure that the employment workgroup develops a timeline for completing its action items and develops a process for measuring its success in improving employment outcomes for veterans. Specifically, the department should take the lead for establishing a time frame for evaluating tools to help assess and translate military skills into finding civilian jobs and establishing a transition assistance program for veterans.

To evaluate the success of the veterans assistance program going forward, the department should analyze the performance of the grant recipients across all three common measures. Further, the program manager unit and the reporting unit should work together to ensure that the data the program manager unit is using to assess program performance are the most appropriate and the best available.

To assess whether it is doing enough to take advantage of federal requirements that federal contractors give preference to veterans when hiring, the department should determine why the reported number of veterans receiving employment with federal contractors is so low relative to the number of job referrals made and it should provide appropriate direction to the veterans employment representatives to better leverage the federal contractor job listing.

To help protect the State's citizens from identity theft, the Legislature should expressly authorize the department, on its own initiative, to share information from the Base Wage File with appropriate law enforcement officials when evidence exists of the potential misuse of Social Security numbers. If the department receives such legal authority, it should, at least annually, review the Base Wage File for associations of multiple names with a single Social Security number. The department should also establish a reasonable threshold for the number of associated names that will trigger further scrutiny from the department or referral to law enforcement.