Agency's Diversity Training Program Achieves Perfect Completion Rate, Zero Verifiable Completions

The Department of Administrative Services has announced that 100 percent of its 14,000 employees have successfully completed the agency's mandatory Inclusive Workplace Awareness Program — a finding that carries an asterisk the size of the federal deficit.

WASHINGTON — On the morning of March 4th, the Department of Administrative Services issued a press release announcing a landmark achievement in employee development. All 14,000 of the department's staff had, according to official records, completed the agency's mandatory Inclusive Workplace Awareness Program, a six-module online training initiative designed to help federal employees recognize unconscious bias, practice inclusive communication, and, in Module Five, identify microaggressions in a series of animated workplace scenarios involving characters named things like "Devon" and "Priya."

By afternoon, the same system had issued a second report. It showed that all 14,000 employees had failed catastrophically.

By the following Tuesday, a third report had appeared, indicating that 7,000 employees had completed the training, 7,000 had not yet started it, and a further 847 employees — a figure that exceeds the department's actual headcount for that division — had completed it twice.

"We consider all three reports to be informative," said Deputy Director of Human Capital Strategy Marcus Oyelaran at a briefing this week. "They each capture a different dimension of the data."

The dimension in which employees actually completed the training remains, for the moment, uncharted.

The System Behind the Statistics

The Inclusive Workplace Awareness Program is administered through the department's Employee Learning and Compliance Tracking System, known internally as ELCTS and pronounced, by the staff who use it daily, with a weariness that has become a kind of institutional accent.

ELCTS was procured in 1998 for $2.3 million as part of a broader federal push to digitize training records. Its original purpose was to track completion of a workplace safety module that was discontinued in 2004. The system has since been repurposed, patched, expanded, partially migrated, and on one occasion in 2011 accidentally merged with a procurement database, resulting in a six-week period during which several employees were technically classified as office furniture.

The technical documentation for ELCTS — last formally updated in 2009, though a handwritten note in the margin of page 47 suggests someone looked at it in 2016 — describes the system as "stable pending review." The review has not been completed. The person assigned to complete it retired in 2013 and has not been replaced, because replacing her would require submitting a staffing request through a different legacy system that communicates with ELCTS only intermittently and only in a file format that ceased to be standard during the second Bush administration.

"The system works," said the department's Chief Information Officer, Sandra Chu, at Thursday's briefing. "It just works in a way that requires some interpretive context."

The Training Itself

The Inclusive Workplace Awareness Program was developed in 2019 by a consulting firm retained at a cost of $1.7 million to produce what the contract describes as "a comprehensive, evidence-based, scalable digital learning experience designed to cultivate inclusive workplace behaviors across diverse employee populations."

The program consists of six modules, each approximately forty minutes long, featuring animated scenarios, reflective exercises, and knowledge-check quizzes. Module Three, which addresses the dynamics of privilege in professional settings, contains a quiz question that three separate employees have reported has no correct answer — a concern submitted via the program's feedback portal, which routes to an email address that has been unmonitored since the contractor's engagement ended in 2020.

Module Six, the program's culminating unit on "Becoming an Inclusion Champion," requires employees to submit a written personal commitment statement before the system will register their completion. Approximately 4,200 employees have reported that after submitting their statements, the system responded with an error message reading: "Submission received. Submission not received. Please contact your administrator."

The department's administrator for ELCTS is currently a position listed as vacant.

"We encourage employees to retain a screenshot," said Deputy Director Oyelaran.

The Completion Statistics

Despite the system's documented inconsistencies, the department has continued to report completion statistics to Congress as part of its annual diversity and inclusion accountability submission. Last year's report cited an 87 percent completion rate for the Inclusive Workplace Awareness Program, a figure that the department's own internal audit, conducted in the same quarter, was unable to verify.

The audit, a twelve-page document obtained through a public records request, notes that ELCTS "does not consistently distinguish between module initiation, module completion, and system timeout events," meaning that an employee who opened Module One and then walked away to get coffee may be recorded as having completed the entire program, while an employee who finished all six modules and submitted their personal commitment statement may be recorded as having done nothing at all.

The audit recommends replacing ELCTS with a modern learning management system, at an estimated cost of $4.8 million. The recommendation has been under review since 2021.

"We're committed to getting this right," said CIO Chu. "We want the data to reflect the genuine cultural progress happening in this department."

When asked what data would reflect that progress if ELCTS could not be trusted to provide it, Chu said the department was "exploring supplemental verification mechanisms," which sources described as meaning paper sign-in sheets.

What Employees Say

Several department employees, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss training programs with the press, offered their own assessments of the initiative.

"I completed it in 2022," said one program analyst. "I have an email confirmation. The system says I haven't started it. I've been assigned it again every quarter for two years. I know Module Three by heart. I've started to find the animated characters comforting."

A senior policy advisor noted that her division of thirty-one people had collectively completed the training nineteen times between them, according to the department's own records, despite the fact that several of her colleagues had never seen it. "The system seems to be redistributing completions," she said. "Like a bureaucratic sharing economy."

A facilities manager described receiving an automated reminder to complete the training on the same day that he received a certificate of completion for the same training. He keeps both documents on his desk. "I feel like Schrödinger's inclusive employee," he said. "Simultaneously enlightened and unenlightened, depending on which report you pull."

The Path Forward

The Department of Administrative Services has announced that it will conduct a full audit of its training completion data in the second half of the fiscal year. The audit will be managed by a newly formed working group, which will use ELCTS to track its own progress.

"We're confident this process will give us a clear picture," said Deputy Director Oyelaran.

The system's technical documentation describes its reporting function as "accurate within known parameters."

The known parameters have not been published.

Module Four of the Inclusive Workplace Awareness Program, which covers the importance of clear and transparent communication, remains, per ELCTS, both completed and not yet started by everyone in the building.