WASHINGTON (AP) – Some unemployed workers seeking job training from the government’s One-Stop Career Centers are being denied service because funding is based on measures like job placement rates and wage increases, congressional investigators said Wednesday.

“The performance measurement system is flawed, causing some One-Stops to deny services to some clients who may be most in need of them,” Sigurd Nilsen, a General Accounting Office director, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

The centers provide job training services to more than 19 million people a year in communities across the country. They are partnerships between federal, state and local governments and often include private companies and charitable organizations.

The Workforce Investment Act, or WIA, which created the centers, must be reauthorized by Congress this year.

To receive all their federal funds, the centers must meet a variety of performance levels, including certain job placement rates and increases in wages.

Officials in five states told GAO investigators that “local areas are reluctant to provide WIA-funded services to job seekers who may be less likely to find employment or experience earnings increases when they are placed in a job,” Nilsen said in his testimony.

For example, some local areas screen potential participants and hold meetings to decide whether to register them, he said. Also, some laid-off workers who received high salaries or large severance bonuses and are seeking services also get turned away because of the difficulty in matching or increasing their wages in a new job.

Another problem is there is no way to measure the overall effectiveness of the centers, Nilsen said. More than 17 programs provide services through the centers, and most have their own performance standards.

Formulas used to allocate funds also are problematic and do not reflect the true needs of a community, he said. For example, the youth program targets a specific group of low-income teens with certain barriers to employment. Yet most of that program’s funds get distributed based on general unemployment measures.

The Labor Department, which oversees the system, wants to streamline the many separate programs into just two funding streams that would provide block grants to states. The House passed such a bill last month, but the Senate has not yet acted.

The federal government’s share of the program is about $6.6 billion.

AP-ES-06-18-03 1723EDT