Federal Pay-Setting Surveys Could Be Performed More Efficiently

GAO was requested to review certain aspects of federal wage and salary surveys and to identify more efficient alternatives. The federal government spends a great deal of time and money surveying the non-federal sector for wage and salary information. Some of this effort is repetitious and unnecessary. Of the many surveys done each year, GAO identified three that could be combined with other surveys, could be done less frequently, or could be replaced with other satisfactory information: (1) the Federal Wage System Appropriated Fund Survey; (2) the Federal Wage System Nonappropriated Fund Survey; and (3) the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Professional, Administrative, Technical, and Clerical Survey. Presently, the BLS annual survey to set Federal white collar pay costs $2.3 million a year and is used to determine the comparability of the current salaries of private sector jobs with the salaries of comparable Federal jobs. However, the survey is largely an unproductive effort since Presidents have seldom used its results. Thus, GAO believes that the BLS white collar survey can be done less often.

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