New York left worker on job training rolls for 21 years; thousands in system after ending program

Twenty-one years is a long time to be in a job-training program.

But that’s just what New York’s Department of Labor systems showed, according to a new inspector general’s audit that found the state left thousands of people on its rolls well after they’d completed their federally funded training programs.

The most egregious example was the person who was enrolled in the system for 7,708 days — more than 21 years. But investigators said they found others who were left on the rolls for more than two years, and more than 16,000 in total who were left in the system after they’d completed their programs.

The U.S. Labor Department inspector general also found 12,661 names on the state’s rolls that were double-counted.

Investigators also reviewed a sampling of people who received training, and found 48% in one set of programs and 32% in another set lacked documentation in their files to prove they actually qualified for the services.

The audit covered federal fiscal years 2019 through 2021, which captured about a year and a half of the coronavirus pandemic.

New York collected about $740 million in federal money for its career, training and support services programs.

The program claimed to serve about 210,000 people in 2019, 128,000 in 2020 and 201,000 in 2021.

The inspector general said nearly 30,000 of those were “overstated,” with the 12,661 double-counted and the 16,836 who were left on the rolls after they stopped getting services.

The report was aimed at prodding the federal Labor Department’s Employment and Training Administration, which oversees the job training programs at issue and which, investigators said, was supposed to be pushing states to clean up their rolls.

New York said it had “controls” to boot people off the rolls 90 days after they stopped getting services, but the inspector general said it didn’t appear to work.

“The data included an individual who was enrolled in the system for 7,708 days, or over 21 years,” the inspector general said. “Therefore, we found ETA’s monitoring of NYSDOL’s controls was not effective.”

The inspector general made a half-dozen recommendations to ETA.

It did not file a formal response to the audit, so it’s not clear whether it agreed with those recommendations.