The objective of our inspection was to review the U.S. Department of Education’s (Department) administration of its reasonable accommodation program. This included determining whether reasonable accommodation requests were processed timely and in accordance with applicable policies and procedures.
We found that improvements are needed in the Department’s processing of reasonable accommodation requests. Specifically, we found that the Department did not always process employee reasonable accommodation requests in accordance with relevant policies and procedures or maintain adequate documentation to allow for a determination of whether it complied with these policies and procedures, including those related to processing timeframes. In addition, we found that the Department did not adequately process applicant reasonable accommodation requests to ensure that accommodations were only provided to applicants with a qualifying disability. We also found that the Department does not have adequate processes to track and report on reasonable accommodation requests. The processes used by the Department do not ensure that all requests are captured, that data specific to the requests is adequately tracked, and that data is properly reported. We also noted issues with the quality of the data included in spreadsheets used by the Department to track and report on reasonable accommodation requests.
We made 13 recommendations to the Deputy Secretary to improve the Department’s processing, tracking, and reporting of reasonable accommodation requests and improve the overall administration of the reasonable accommodation program.