U.S. Department of State Fiscal Year 2019 Agency Financial Report

6  W orkforce M anagement The Bureau of Human Resources rightly identifies staff as the Department’s greatest asset. The Department accordingly expends substantial resources on recruiting, training, and retaining a diverse, talented workforce capable of carrying out the Department’s foreign policy goals and priorities. However, OIG’s work finds that staffing gaps, frequent turnover, poor leadership, and inexperienced and undertrained staff frequently contribute to the Department’s other management challenges. Workforce management issues are pervasive, affecting programs and operations domestically and overseas and across functional areas and geographic regions. Maintaining Adequate Staffing Levels to Meet Operational Needs Many Department entities experience difficulty maintaining staffing levels, a problem that was compounded this year due to the Department-wide hiring freeze, which is discussed in more detail below. Embassy Nassau, The Bahamas, was among those posts that faced significant operations challenges due to lengthy staffing gaps in three key leadership positions: ambassador, deputy chief of mission (DCM), and management officer. The embassy had been without a permanent, confirmed ambassador since November 2011. 62 At the Office of Foreign Missions (OFM), the acting Director held three leadership positions, and employees described him as overburdened and overwhelmed. 63 Meanwhile, OIG noted that shifts in 62 OIG, Inspection of Embassy Nassau, The Bahamas (ISP-I-19-19, August 2019). 63 ISP-I-19-21, May 2019. 64 Ibid . 65 ISP-I-19-08, October 2018. 66 AUD-MERO-19-10, November 2018. 67 ISP-I-19-10, December 2018. 68 Ibid . workload were not accompanied by a commensurate realignment of personnel and redefinition of office functions. As a result, at the same time that some OFM employees did not have enough work, others had more work than they could complete. 64 In another example, we found that staff morale at Embassy Nairobi suffered because of a heavy workload and long hours associated with the months-long Kenyan election process and post-election violence. With the end of election-related violence in mid-April 2018, the embassy returned to a more normal work-life balance, but officers were still recovering from the effects of the heavy workload and long hours. 65 Providing Appropriate Training/Ensuring Staff Are Appropriately Qualified Underqualified staff is an issue that frequently intersects with the Department’s difficulties managing and overseeing contracts. For example, in Iraq, a lack of qualified personnel to serve as CORs suggested a shortfall in human capital planning. The Department has previously recognized issues with its COR workforce, but we found that initiatives recommended by a working group that was created to address the issue were not considered after the group concluded its work. 66 Inadequate training is also a problem. For example, in India, political officers responsible for human rights, trafficking in persons, political-military affairs, counterterrorism, and nonproliferation did not have functional training in these areas. 67 The lack of a documented process for setting and funding training priorities also prevented Public Affairs Section leadership from maximizing available resources to meet training needs. 68 122 | U nited S tates D epartment of S tate 2019 A gency F inancial R eport OTHER INFORMATION | INSPECTOR GENERAL’S STATEMENT ON THE DEPARTMENT’S MAJOR MANAGEMENT AND PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES