Mr. JENNINGS. GS-5 or 7. GS-5 requires general education which could be picked up in a business degree or a law degree or a degree in management. That satisfies all the requirements for a GS-5.

Mr. GAYDOS. If that is the core of our determination, where fraud would originate and where efficiency would emanate from, is that not a rather limited type of classification, pay classification?

Mr. JENNINGS. That is just the beginning. At the full performance level, it is GS-11.

Mr. GAYDOS. GS-11?

Mr. JENNINGS. That is correct.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. This is a full examiner?

Mr. JENNINGS. That is correct.

Mr. GAYDOS. How long does it take?

Mr. JENNINGS. It takes a year to go to the GS-7, through training and performance and so forth, and another year to the GS-9, and 1 additional year to the GS-11, so you are talking about 3 or 4 years of advanced training and experience before they become fullfledged examiners.

Mr. GAYDOS. How many of them are in-house, promotion from within, just roughly?

Mr. ELISBURG. Virtually all of the examiners. I do not know how many we bring in.

Mr. JENNINGS. I would say probably 50 percent, and this is just a very rough guess. About 50 percent were internal over the last 4 or 5 years, and about 50 percent were outside.

Mr. GAYDOS. When he moves from that internal position that he has over to taking his place in that vacant examiner slot, is my understanding accurate that the person normally that would move into that slot would be a clerk, because of the pay, the beginning pay? He would not be moving in-house from one job to another unless he was somewhat of a new employee or one in a lower slot? How does that work?

Mr. JENNINGS. Most of what you have reference to and what we try to do is promote inside through the development of our internal employees, clerical employees. We encourage them to develop, take college courses, and some of them have partial college training. Mr. GAYDOS. You mean, the clerk will be working and going to night school?

Mr. JENNINGS. That is part, yes. It would not necessarily hold that a clerk moves to an examiner position and is only qualified as a clerk. They do, as the Assistant Secretary mentioned, receive some training and will continue to be subject to new hire training, but in the meantime they are picking up experience in the system, our own system.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. Is there a title for this person?

Mr. JENNINGS. Yes, claims examiner.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. That is a civil service examination?

Mr. ELISBURG. It is not a separate examination.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. So in other words he cannot come in at that level. He can only come in at a lower level and work toward that end. Mr. ELISBURG. You could have someone perhaps come in from the social security system or some other outside system-the Civil Service Commission may be able to qualify them by virtue of other training or experience, perhaps in the insurance industry, perhaps

in some other operation, as a GS-9 or GS-11, and they could come into it that way.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. We have the feeling that these people really did not like their job to begin with, and they do not wish to be there. I would just like you to comment on that.

Mr. ELISBURG. I think when you have a bad morale situation, you have overwork, you have understaff, and you have all of these things, it does not become a happy place. I think if you provide better leadership and better supervision, you provide better tools to do the job, and it begins to look like some kind of a reasonable expectation, you then have people much more interested in career possibilities.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. How about the claims themselves? They have reached a point then where they have learned everything that they are supposed to know, and they are functioning at that point of total understanding that type of claim? In other words, coming from Social Security down to here. Does he know at that level exactly what it is that he is looking for?

Mr. ELISBURG. Well, they get trained, but as you go through the process of development to the journeyperson level of GS-11, the kinds of claims you work on become increasingly more difficult. If you are a new trainee, you are working one level of the claim, and as you move through the system you begin to work on a more complicated level.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. So, you have a training program, you give them a month's training, or whatever the time factor is?

Mr. ELISBURG. There is a month of on-the-job training, their formal classroom training, and then they work under close supervision for a period of time.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. Is there any training going on while they are working on the job so that they know what is happening, where there is a change in――

Mr. ELISBURG. Oh, sure, yes. That is the whole idea. I do not say that in the past it was great, but certainly that was the way in which it was done, and it was certainly a factor to some degree, and in many respects that is the best kind of training you can get. There is no substitute for the on-the-job work with experienced claims examiners. All the courses we can put together will not substitute for that.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. You have changed the administrative guidelines which they are working under now, and you have got different programs that they function under. I hope one of them, by the way, is the continuity of claim. In other words, if John Jones is handling that claim, I hope John Jones follows it through.

Mr. ELISBURG. Well, they do follow it through. It is in their claims sections.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. As the chairman has indicated, every time there was a phone call made, they would say, well, we do not have it any more, Tom Smith has it, and you go from pillar to post.

Mr. ELISBURG. We have tried to eliminate some of that. Another point that we have done and experimented with in several of our offices is the use of claims specialization. We have done the experiment in Chicago primarily. Different kinds of claims would all go to one particular examiner or group of examiners, to see if that

would work out better than each examiner having the broad range. We have not really finished with that experiment yet to make any judgments. We are satisfied with the claims specialization progress, what it did, but not enough to just say we are going to do it through the whole system.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. One other aspect, and then I will let the chairman go back and finish his questioning. Do you have a form of a complaint bureau that responds to claims that claimants have, that could be responded to in a reasonable fashion? Is there an area that the Department of Labor has where people could get in touch with rather than just the regional office, so that there is some investigational process on the claim?

We see that you have 22 investigators going out and checking fraud. have you got anybody out there checking a claim when somebody says they have not been treated properly?

Mr. ELISBURG. Yes; usually that is done out of my office by one of my special assistants. In addition, that is one of the functions that we have specifically assigned to our regional administrators, that when there is a problem and somebody complains there, to get back in and find out what happened. People also use the Department's regional representatives, who are outside of the syetem altogether. That information comes back to my office, or at least the regional administrator can follow through on that.

We also have set up special inquiries units because of these backlog problems in each of our offices, to try to get on top of both phone calls and letters, so that there are either claims examiners or clerks or contact people to try to deal with inquiries and still allow the claims examiners to adjudicate claims. That has been very successful.

Mr. ZEFERETTI. I want to commend you, because I think, for the first time, we have heard some testimony that has attacked some of the problems. Really, it is a breath of fresh air, because what we have been doing is sitting here, with everybody knowing all the problems, but nobody addressing them. I think that for the first time you have given us an indication that the Department is at least stepping out in the right direction. Hopefully you will use us to help you if, in fact, you find some roadblocks along the way that you feel need correcting. We can do it legislatively or otherwise. We want to join with you in that effort. I thank you for your testimony.

Mr. GAYDOS. Mr. Secretary, by design or accident, do you ever get any claim examiners from the private sector, private industry? Mr. ELISBURG. I am not sure whether we get them in the FECA program. I would like the staff to respond.

Mr. JENNINGS. The two other programs we have, the longshore program and the black lung program, are very closely related to the process in the insurance industry, so examiners from industry come through those programs and into the FECA program. There are not that many appointed directly into the FECA program from the private sector, even though there are some.

Mr. GAYDOS. Is GS-11 the top grade?

Mr. JENNINGS. For the examiner the GS-11 is the full journeyman level, GS-12 is the supervisory examiner.

Mr. GAYDOS. How does that compare with private industry?

Mr. JENNINGS. Well, you would have to pick a specific area. In the New York area it may not be too comparable. In Mississippi, they might be much better off than someone working in the private sector. It is difficult to say, but it is competitive.

Mr. GAYDOS. Well, let me ask you a practical question. In your opinion, is it a competitive income?

Mr. JENNINGS. Yes; at the 11 and 12 level it is competitive. Mr. GAYDOS. Do you think it would be of any value or worth to increase that classification up to a GS-13?

Mr. JENNINGS. That is a good question. I think the employees would love that question. [General laughter.]

They would certainly endorse that.

Mr. GAYDOS. I love the employees, too, you know. We would double them if we could cut that backlog down to zero.

Let me ask you this. Maybe, Mr. Secretary, I should ask it directly to you. Would it be feasible to recommend, along with maybe some other things, an increase in that area so that pay is commensurate with the experience required? Would it not be better for you to be thinking along those lines?

Mr. ELISBURG. As this thing becomes more complicated, that is, the cases become more complicated, obviously, the requirements of what the claims examiner is doing can grow, and I would be the last one to suggest that that is not a useful thing to get into. Mr. GAYDOS. Is that not, Mr. Secretary, already complicated? We are talking about nontrauma injuries. We are talking about stress. Again, this appeared on "60 Minutes." I keep coming back to that. We are talking about soft tissue damage and things like that. It is already complicated, is it not?

Mr. ELISBURG. Yes.

Mr. GAYDOS. Psychology is involved, and psychiatrists.

Mr. ELISBURG. I do not want to suggest that there is not room for changing the grade structure. I also do not want to suggest that a grade 11 professional is necessarily a low level employee. That is a professional grade within the GS service, and it gets-I do not want to waffle, but it gets very complicated when you are dealing with other kinds of claims examiners. That is, what is the kind of work that a GS-11 does within the Labor Department as compared with the Social Security Administration or the Veterans' Administration, and are you talking about upgrading 200 examiners or 5,000? Those are the kinds of considerations that both the Department and civil service are concerned about.

Mr. GAYDOS. Well, people wonder what we get paid for. That is what you get paid for. You have to make those determinations, you

see.

Mr. ELISBURG. One of the things that we are going to do as we get this system stabilized is to do some more of the work measurement and job structure evaluation to find out what is it that we are really asking the claims examiner to do. Are we asking people at these grades that perhaps could be a higher grade, where they should be concentrating on more complex issues, and letting some of the lower level work be done by claims clerks or people to put the stuff together.

If you have a claims examiner, for example, which we have had in offices, typing their own letters, doing the work of a GS-4 or

GS-5 secretary, you are not effectively managing your positions or using that resource properly, and those are some of the things we are trying to look at within the offices. We are trying to determine what kind of support people do we need to free the claims examiners for the complex work. I cannot suggest that a GS-11, 12, or 13 is the proper grade at this point, but it is something, I think, that is useful to consider.

Mr. GAYDOS. All right. We are at least on the same wavelength anyhow, in talking about that.

Let me ask you about rehabilitation services. We have heard the term bandied around. We have asked specific questions as to what is it, how intense or extensive is it. Do you have specialized personnel? What kind of a program? How much time is involved? How do you birddog them? I think it is a matter of general consensus that rehabilitation is very important, because if you do not utilize the services, you are going to have elongated claims, that you cannot readjust.

What have you done in your sweeping changes as far as rehabilitation services are concerned, if anything?

Mr. ELISBURG. Well, we have added a number of people in the offices to deal with rehabilitation. I think we have started to emphasize, both within the agencies and within our own agency that it is a function that we need to just have done. I think it is one of the critical items of how do you get people off the roles and back to work. It is generally a problem in the compensation system, with not enough time to spend in rehabilitation. We have spent some time talking with agencies like the Postal Service and the FAA and some others about the importance of having alternative jobs, or light duty jobs, or jobs that someone can move into instead of just being on the compensation rolls. That is sort of the broadest thing.

Mr. JENNINGS. I think the most encouraging thing that we have seen, Mr. Chairman, is through our agency meetings that we have quarterly with the agencies. For the first time really they are coming forward and saying, we would like to make jobs for our injured employees. We are very pleased to see that. The Assistant Secretary mentioned the pilot programs that we have under way in Dallas, Kansas City, and Seattle, and we are working, as we mentioned, with certain installations of the Air Force.

So, we are overcoming the big problem in vocational rehabilitation, and this is having jobs, that someone who goes through a rehab program will have an opportunity for employment. That is the thing that has basically been missing in the past. It has been difficult to place these people once they have completed vocational rehabilitation training.

Mr. GAYDOS. I know that you must utilize the services of the various employing agencies. Would it be of assistance to you if we changed the manner of budgetary requests for compensation payments due to labor from employing agencies and the way that it is now presented before our appropriations committees? Right now they go in and they have a stipulated sum that reflects costs from 2 years earlier. Do you think that a change, to make this a more current budgetary request and give it more significance would help to put more emphasis upon the program of rehabilitation, so that