Supplemental Material for GAO-23-105459: SEC Personnel Survey Results

Background

This supplemental material presents the results from two GAO surveys of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) employees. The purpose of these surveys was to obtain employees’ views about SEC’s personnel management, including questions on (1) recruitment, training, staff development, and resources; (2) communication between and within divisions and offices; (3) leadership and management; (4) performance management and promotions; (5) organizational culture and climate; and (6) diversity and inclusion. Our web-based questionnaires included both multiple-choice and open-ended questions. Below are links to our questionnaires as well as the results of the surveys. See GAO-23-105459 for a more detailed discussion of our scope and methodology, as well as a discussion of survey results.

We administered two questionnaires to different employee groups at SEC, as described below. Both employee groups’ questionnaires generally covered the same topic areas, although some questions differed between questionnaires based on what was relevant to that group. To minimize the risk of identifying individual respondents, responses to open-ended questions are not reported. Respondents' division, location, position, supervisory status, and tenure were self-reported in the questionnaire.

(a) Nonexecutive mission-critical employees. We administered the first questionnaire to a stratified random sample of 931 nonexecutive employees in mission-critical occupations in mission-critical divisions and offices. SEC has designated five occupations—attorneys, accountants, examiners, economists, and information technology specialists—as mission-critical because they reflect SEC’s primary mission and because mission‐critical work cannot be completed without them. SEC has also designated three offices and six divisions—the Offices of Information Technology, Credit Ratings, and the Chief Accountant, and the Divisions of Corporation Finance, Enforcement, Examinations, Investment Management, Economic and Risk Analysis, and Trading and Markets—as mission-critical offices and divisions because they are primarily responsible for implementing the agency’s mission.

Our survey population for the nonexecutive mission-critical employees consisted of employees who were employed at SEC as of December 9, 2021, according to SEC data. We administered the questionnaire to nonsupervisory and supervisory mission-critical employees between April 2022 and May 2022. A total of 665 of the 931 mission-critical employees responded to our survey for a weighted response rate of 71 percent. We carried out a statistical nonresponse bias analysis for the survey of mission-critical employees using available administrative data and used post-stratification to adjust the sampling weights for differential rates of response between supervisory and nonsupervisory employees. With this adjustment of the sampling weights for nonresponse bias, the results of the survey are generalizable to SEC’s mission-critical employees. Because we used a sampling methodology, the results for the nonexecutive employees are presented as estimated percentages with 95 percent confidence intervals.

(b) Mission-critical senior officers. We administered the second questionnaire between April 2022 and May 2022 to all 78 senior officers in mission-critical occupations and mission-critical divisions and offices. Our population for the survey consisted of employees who were employed at SEC as of December 9, 2021, according to SEC data. A total of 58 of the 78 senior officers responded to our questionnaire for a response rate of 74 percent. We do not attempt to extrapolate the findings of our senior officer survey to the senior officers in mission-critical occupations and mission-critical divisions and offices who chose not to complete our questionnaire.

We conducted the work upon which this supplement is based from October 2021 to December 2022 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives.

Contact

For more information, contact Michael E. Clements at (202) 512-8678 or clementsm@gao.gov.

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Copyright

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