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Audit: Pa. ignored vets in filling state jobs

HARRISBURG, Pa. — The State Civil Service Commission has fallen down on the job and failed to help hundreds of qualified military veterans get hired into positions with Pennsylvania’s state agencies, Auditor General Jack Wagner said Wednesday.

In an audit released Wednesday, Wagner reported that 569 jobs over four years should have been filled with military veterans, but were not. In each case, the veterans scored in the top three on civil service tests — even before they received the required extra points for their military service, Wagner said.

“We found that they were ignored, yes, there is no doubt about that, and there was not justification to support why someone else was hired,” said Wagner, a Marine Corps veteran who fought in Vietnam and is considered a likely candidate for the Democratic nomination to run for governor in 2010.

The commission did not agree with all of the findings and it disputed the contention that the commission is not properly enforcing requirements that veterans get a preference when applying for public-sector jobs.

“The State Civil Service Commission does not and would not condone state or other client agencies circumventing legally required veterans’ preference,” the commission’s executive director, Jeffrey T. Wallace, said in a statement responding to Wagner’s audit.

In a separate response printed in the audit, the commission said it thinks actions by state agencies to review lists of candidates and conduct interviews refutes speculation that the agencies tried to avoid hiring veterans. But there is no prohibition against state agencies hiring from a separate list drawn from current state employees or current employees of that agency, it said.

“Opportunities were made available to the eligible veteran,” the commission wrote. “However, the (state agency) legally hired another candidate from a separate list or used another employment option.”

Wagner said passing over veterans for the 569 jobs is a violation of the spirit of the 1975 law that grants hiring preference to qualified veterans who pass a civil service test.

It is the commission’s job to oversee the hiring process and provide lists of qualified applicants to state agencies, Wagner said.

He acknowledged that the commission followed proper procedures to fill thousands of jobs during the period studied, July 2002 through June 2006. He also acknowledged that there might be instances in which a state agency could decide that the top three applicants on the initial list do not meet their needs, but he called those instances rare.

“When they do that, they have to justify that in writing to the civil service commission,” Wagner said. “That did not happen in these 569 positions.”

The commission said that adopting Wagner’s suggestion that agencies hire only from a list of applicants that may include people from outside state government, including veterans, is ill-conceived.

For one, such a rule does not account for seniority rights for union-covered employees or the career path of current state employees, it said. Plus, drawing employees from different lists of applicants does not mean that veterans will not be on the lists, it said.