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Strategic Objective
Provide income support when work is impossible or unavailable and facilitate return to work.
Strategic Objective
Overview
OWCP protects the interests of workers who are injured or become ill on the job. As a result of job-related injury or illness, workers covered by programs administered by the Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs are faced with potentially devastating economic, health, employment and other challenges. Additionally, the Secretary’s vision of promoting and protecting opportunity includes a streamlined reemployment system to help unemployed job seekers return to work. A more effective and efficient workforce system expands opportunities for workers to get the skills they need, while timely and accurate payments to unemployed workers give individuals who have lost jobs the chance to stay afloat while finding their next job.
Read Less...Progress Update
The Office of Workers’ Compensation Programs (OWCP) and ETA’s Office of Unemployment Insurance (OUI), Trade Adjustment Assistance, and Employment Services programs support this objective.
The share of federal employees with work-related injuries or illnesses under the Federal Employee Compensation Act (FECA) program’s Disability Management that were reemployed by non-postal federal agencies fell from 91.6 percent in FY 2011 to 89.7 percent in FY 2015. The percent of first payment of compensation issued within 30 days for Defense Base Act (Longshore) cases rose from 56 percent in FY 2011 to 67 percent in FY 2015. The average number of days to process Black Lung claims rose from 238 days in FY 2011 to 273 days in FY 2015. To improve decision quality for Black Lung claims, OWCP launched a pilot to develop supplemental medical evidence for a subset of claims and began conducting spot audits of all Black Lung proposed decisions. The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program’s average number of days between filing date and final decision for cases sent to NIOSH when a hearing is held fell from 619 in FY 2011 to 497 in FY 2015.
OUI, in collaboration with the ETA Regional offices, has worked aggressively with states and provided significant technical assistance and resources to reduce the improper payment rate, ensure program integrity, and to improve program performance overall. Intrastate First Payments made within 21 days improved by over three percentage points to 83.5 percent in FY 2015. Although the first payment timeliness performance has improved when compared to FY 2013 and FY 2014, this performance is still below the FY 2015 target for this measure – 87.5 percent. Twenty-four states did not meet the Acceptable Level of Performance (ALP) for the overpayment detection measure in FY 2015, a slight decline in performance improvement over the 22 states not meeting the ALP in FY 2014. States failing to meet the 50 percent overpayment detection ALP were required to develop a corrective action plan as part of their FY 2016 State Quality Service Plan submission.
In FY 2014, ETA embarked on a major multi-year initiative to reengineer the processes to improve program oversight and manage accountability for state Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefit processes with significantly reduced resources. ETA developed a new framework to integrate peer/case review processes with new operational review processes. As part of this effort, ETA established new criteria for designating poorly performing states using a more comprehensive approach that integrates overall program performance, program integrity, and state operational policies and practices. FY 2016 is a pivotal year for the reengineering project with much of the work moving toward full implementation and key new accountability elements that focus more on program operations and business processes moving into pilot testing and refinement before full implementation in FY 2017.
Since 2005, ETA has offered supplemental funding to state UI workforce agencies to address the individual reemployment needs of UI claimants through the voluntary UI Reemployment and Eligibility Assessments (REA) program, and beginning in FY 2015, through the voluntary RESEA program. RESEA participants are active job seekers who are referred to reemployment services best suited to meet their individual needs. In FY 2015, a total of 48 states operated a RESEA program. The President’s FY 2017 Budget includes $150.9 million for a permanent Reemployment Services and Eligibility Assessments (RESEA) program targeting recipients of unemployment benefits identified as those most likely to exhaust their benefits as well as all transitioning veterans receiving Unemployment Compensation for Ex-service members (UCX). The budget also proposes comprehensive Unemployment Insurance (UI) reforms that will put the system on a stronger financial footing, make the program more responsive to future downturns, improve the program’s connection to work and training, and expand eligibility for those who
need it most.
Evidence suggests that wage insurance and supplements for dislocated workers may help them transition faster to new jobs. Since 2009, the Trade Adjustment Assistance program (TAA) has included a wage supplement in the form of Reemployment Trade Adjustment Assistance (RTAA). This benefit encourages eligible workers age 50 and older to accept new jobs more rapidly by offsetting earnings losses after losing their previous jobs, providing up to $10,000 in wage supplements to workers who find reemployment and earn less than $50,000 a year. From FY 2011 to FY 2015, the proportion of trade participants who are receiving this benefit has increased from 3.3% to 13.1%. In FY 2015, approximately $24.9 million in RTAA benefits were paid to 6,213 recipients.
Eligible adversely affected workers are also provided access to income support in the form of Trade Readjustment Allowances (TRA) during their participation in the TAA program. From FY 2011 to FY 2015, the proportion of trade participants receiving TRA increased from 30.9% to 56.2%. In FY 2015, approximately $209.5 million in TRA benefits were paid to 26,595 participants to support their training and reemployment efforts.
