Employment agencies and job centers try to integrate people into training or work with numerous measures.
(Photo: imago / photothek)
Berlin They have titles such as “Examination crackers: Understanding of tasks for trainees” or “Your own strengths / weaknesses analysis as the basis for your career and application”: courses that employment agencies and job centers buy from external providers and convey to their customers – with the aim of helping them integrate into the training or labor market.
The problem with this is that it is difficult to estimate in advance which advanced training courses or courses are needed and how many unemployed or prospective trainees are eligible. This sometimes means that measures are bought for a lot of money, but then places remain free.
In its annual report published this Tuesday, the Federal Audit Office assumes that hundreds of millions are wasted every year. For 2017, the auditors put the cost of vacant positions in labor market policy measures at 357 million euros.
The Federal Employment Agency (BA) should “immediately introduce comprehensive and uniform utilization monitoring for all labor market measures purchased at agencies and job centers,” says the auditor’s report. “This should also reflect the expenses for unoccupied places to take part.”
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There is little financial leeway to use funds efficiently
The Court of Auditors expects the Federal Ministry of Labor to push ahead with implementation. “The increasing financial leeway in particular also makes it necessary to use funds effectively for the target groups of the measures instead of financing unoccupied places to take part,” the report continues. In view of the record expenditures caused by the corona, the BA has completely used up its reserves and will be dependent on federal funds for the third time in a row in 2022 to cover its expenditures.
For 2017, the Court of Auditors examined 2767 offered labor market measures in a sample. The employment agencies paid a total of 263 million euros for this, of which 32.2 million or 12.2 percent were vacant positions.
In the case of the job centers, the expenditures in the sample amounted to 144.3 million euros. Of this, 23 million euros or 15.9 percent were spent on places in measures for which no participants were found.
In total, agencies and job centers paid 55.2 million euros for vacant positions. It should be noted here that the Court of Auditors considered the expenditure over the entire course of these measures in the case of multiannual measures, which in some cases began well before 2017 or continued beyond the reference year.
If you extrapolate this sum to all 34,000 current labor market policy measures in 2017, then course, seminar or further training places were purchased for 357 million euros that nobody used. Of this, the employment agencies accounted for 263 million and the job centers for 94 million.
There are definitely ways and means to use the money more sparingly, writes the Court of Auditors. Agencies and job centers could contractually agree with educational institutions that only a certain minimum number of places are to be paid for. Any additional places purchased must only be paid for if they are actually occupied. However, this procedure is not used for all purchased measures.
The Federal Employment Agency has taken steps to make better use of labor market policy measures
Monitoring is also important in order to get an overview of vacant spaces and to be able to better utilize the measures. The Federal Audit Office had repeatedly criticized the low occupancy rate and high expenditure for unused spaces, most recently in 2019 in connection with assisted training, a funding instrument for young people and young adults.
The BA has taken various steps so that, for example, more measures with a shorter contract duration or a minimum number of participants that are to be paid for are being purchased. Nevertheless, an overview of free capacities is still missing, according to the report. Agencies and job centers are accordingly not in a position to fill vacancies in good time and thus improve capacity utilization. “There is also the risk that they will overestimate the need for places to take part and labor market measures and buy too much again in the following year.”
The BA should therefore check whether it can expand the existing IT process for the agencies and also make it available to the job centers. The Federal Agency and the Federal Ministry of Labor should “act quickly and consistently in order to be able to use their funds economically and effectively, especially against the background of increasingly scarce financial leeway – namely for participants instead of vacant positions”, demand the auditors.
In 2019, the last year before the start of the corona crisis, the BA counted an annual average of over 873,000 participants in labor market policy measures, around half of which were placed by the employment agencies and half of the job centers.
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