Equal Employment Opportunity: EEOC Birmingham Office Closed Discrimination Charges Without Full Investigation: Hrd-87-81

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) is an independent agency that works for Congress. The GAO watches over Congress, and investigates how the federal government spends taxpayers dollars. The Comptroller General of the United States is the leader of the GAO, and is appointed to a 15-year term by the U.S. President. The GAO wants to support Congress, while at the same time doing right by the citizens of the United States. They audit, investigate, perform analyses, issue legal decisions and report anything that the government is doing. This is one of their reports. GAO found that: (1) the Birmingham office closed 29 percent of the charges without completing a full investigation; (2) the investigations were deficient because they lacked comparative documentary evidence on the respondent's treatment of the charging party compared with other employees; (3) although the EEOC compliance manual provides specific guidance on how to resolve conflicting evidence, 83 percent of the charges did not include documentary evidence corroborating the respondent's reply to the charge; and (4) district managers instructed compliance investigators to close charges with insufficient evidence. GAO also found that: (1) the district office has not conducted full investigations since EEOC established unrealistic production goals in 1978; and (2) the district office staff considers investigations to be merely paperwork processes.