Auditor recommends shutting down city's workforce development agency
Report earns sharp response from city's COO
City Hall's auditor this week found numerous issues with the Atlanta's job placement and workforce development program, which she says the city should consider shutting down.
In addition, City Auditor Leslie Ward told Mayor Kasim Reed and the Atlanta City Council that some indications of "potential fraud and/or abuse" discovered during her office's probe of the Atlanta Workforce Development Agency were referred to "an external investigative agency."
The AWDA, which is technically part of the city's executive branch, aims to help people gain entry into the workforce. Nearly 80 percent of its funding comes from federal grants. The remainder is mostly supported by various public and private funding sources, including contributions from the United Way and the Atlantic Station Tax Allocation District.
According to Ward's 52-page report, the agency holds no information on performance outcomes for almost 90 percent of the clients entered into its tracking database. In addition, more than half of the 25,310 clients the AWDA served between July 2010 and May 2012 lived outside the city's limits, the report said. The audit also says the agency also doesn't reliably track employers in its database, making it difficult to gauge how many workers are hired by firms that participate in job fairs or subsidized on-the-job training programs.
In a sharp response to Ward, Duriya Farooqui, the city's chief operating officer, called the recommendation to eliminate the program "perplexing."
"The loss of AWDA would have an immediate detrimental impact on the City's economic development and may hinder the City's competitiveness," Farooqui wrote in her letter. "In a time when the economy has displaced so many workers, it does not make any sense to remove a workforce development function from the city when it continues to serve so many disadvantaged residents."