Auditors: $230 million in Labor Dept. grants had no criteria for success

Auditors: $230 million in Labor Dept. grants had no criteria for success | WashingtonGuardian
"You'd expect a program to help train workers in new skills would have grades to measure how well the students learned.
And you'd expect the program itself to be graded on whether it actually helped those students find employment after they graduated.
But that's precisely what a Labor Department jobs program failed to measure for grants it made in 2010 and 2011, auditors say.
Facing rising unemployment nationwide, the Labor Department Employment and Training Administration (ETA) used a discretionary grant program to support schools and businesses that were training workers and helping them find jobs.
But an internal investigation revealed that there were few benchmarks for measuring whether the grants were actually helping people find work or achieving their other goals -- and sometimes results were simply not documented.
In fact, investigators think more than one-third of the programs -- more than 200 grants out of 560 that were handed out -- might have failed, at a total cost approaching $230 million.