Government still having major problems hiring border agents and customs officers.

https://www.govexec.com/management/2018/11/administration-signed-contract-bring-7500-border-personnel-its-hired-just-15/153036/?oref=top-story

The Administration Signed a Contract to Bring on 7,500 Border Personnel. It's Hired Just 15.

By Eric Katz

November 26, 2018

A consultant hired by the Trump administration to boost the number of border agents and customs officers has brought on just 15 of the 7,500 called for in its $300 million contract, according to figures provided by the agency.

Customs and Border Protection has so far obligated $43 million on the contract with Accenture, which is worth up to $297 million over five years. The agency invested $23.5 million in Accenture hires and an additional $19.1 million for start-up costs. The company has so far produced just 15 employees who have actually started working for CBP. Another 33 have accepted job offers.

CBP issued the contract to help fulfill President Trump’s mandate that the agency hire 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, which he issued through executive order shortly after taking office. Accenture was tasked with onboarding those 5,000, plus an additional 2,000 customs officers and 500 air and marine officers. Accenture gets paid on a per-hire basis, most of which comes when CBP sends an offer letter to a candidate and the remaining amount when the employee actually starts working.

The $43 million already obligated was slated for Accenture to help CBP bring on 600 employees. CBP is still confident the spending will bear fruit, with a spokesperson saying Accenture has 3,700 additional candidates in the hiring process. The contractor expects a “gradual increase of candidates to successfully exit the process in the coming months,” the spokesperson said.

Asked if CBP is happy with the progress Accenture is making, the spokesperson said the agency is documenting the contractor’s performance, but added Accenture is showing some progress.

“The Accenture contract reached full operating capacity on July 1, 2018,” the spokesperson said. “In the five months since that point, CBP has seen a steady increase in Accenture applicants entering the hiring pipeline, and a small amount are beginning to successfully enter the CBP workforce.”

CBP has long struggled with hiring and retaining employees. In fiscal 2017, Border Patrol hired just 1.36 percent of applicants were given jobs at the agency—a rate that has increased threefold since fiscal 2015. Hiring ticked up in fiscal 2018, but the agency still saw a net loss of 76 agents in the first half of the year. It has sped up the hiring process through a series of reforms to the polygraph process, physical testing and new authorities from the Office of Personnel Management, but it still took 274 days to bring on a new agent in fiscal 2017. More than three out of four applicants still fail their polygraph, and Border Patrol currently employs 7,000 fewer agents than the figure Trump mandated.

CBP still has yet to fill 2,000 customs officer jobs Congress authorized in 2014.

The agency has already adjusted its Accenture contract four times to give CBP more responsibility and lower Accenture’s pay rate, improve a platform used to manage recruiting and other modifications. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, previously raised concerns about the structure of the contract.

An individual supporting CBP on a separate contract said it is "widely known" within CBP's human resources management office that Accenture "has not lived up [to] the expectations of the contract over the last year."

"This really has been a huge waste of money since Accenture received a large up-front amount, regardless of if they hired anyone," the individual said, calling the deal "flawed from the beginning" because it created duplicative work CBP was already doing.

A spokeswoman for Accenture declined to comment, referring all questions to CBP.

Trump has also called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement to hire 10,000 new deportation officers, tripling its current numbers. ICE solicited a similar contract for help in bringing on 26,000 new employees, but subsequently canceled it due to delays in receiving adequate funding. The administration said it would re-solicit the contract in the first quarter of fiscal 2019, but has yet to do so.

GE (icon manufacturer of America) is going to hell due to its long term care insurance business

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/the-dollar15-billion-money-pit-dragging-ge-down/ar-BBQc3CI?ocid=spartandhp

The $15 billion money pit dragging GE down

Katherine Chiglinsky and Sonali Basak 1 hr ago

Jack Welch built it, Jeff Immelt milked it and John Flannery failed to fix it.

Now Larry Culp must figure out what to do with the troubled remnants of GE Capital, the finance arm that nearly sank General Electric Co. a decade ago.

With anxiety over GE running high on Wall Street, Culp, the new chief executive officer, has a lot of work to do. So far GE – once the quintessential American conglomerate – just keeps stumbling from bad to worse.

But perhaps Culp’s most formidable challenge is the gaping hole inside the financial unit. A big part of the trouble has to do with GE’s book of long-term care insurance, a vestige of GE Capital that backs policies which pay for things like home health aides and nursing-home stays. Once little more than an afterthought, the portfolio has turned into a money pit that threatens to complicate efforts to turn around GE as worries grow over a funding shortage.

While GE has tried all year to offload the liabilities and Culp said no issue at the finance arm gets more attention, few see any easy answers. The problem is twofold. As medical costs soar and Americans live longer, GE’s assumptions about what it will have to pay out are proving to be too rosy. This year, the firm said it will need an extra $15 billion to cover future claims.

But unloading them on a would-be buyer will likely come at a very steep price. Past deals have suggested transactions of this type are often “prohibitively expensive,” analysts at Evercore Inc. have said.

Insurers including Athene Holding Ltd., backed by private equity firm Apollo Global Management LLC, have expressed interest in GE’s insurance assets, but talks have since cooled under Culp, according to people familiar with the matter. GE has also held talks with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. about absorbing its insurance liabilities, two people said.

“It’s very difficult to sell” these types of policies, said GB Taglioni, North American leader of Boston Consulting’s insurance practice. He declined to talk about GE’s situation specifically. “There have been a lot of sellers and there have been, up until now, very few buyers.”

A GE spokeswoman declined to comment beyond recent filings and public comments, while Athene and Apollo also declined to comment. A Berkshire representative didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The situation has become all the more pressing as worries about GE’s finances deepen. In the past year, the company’s woes have wiped out more than $90 billion from its stock market value, called into question the sustainability of its debt burden and cost Flannery his job. Under Flannery, the industrial giant tried in vain to appease Wall Street by selling various businesses, like its energy finance and industrial gas-engine units, to shore up its balance sheet.

The insurance business itself came to the fore in spectacular fashion earlier this year after GE disclosed a $6.2 billion charge for the fourth quarter of 2017. It led to an ongoing regulatory investigation of GE’s accounting practices and shined a light on how precarious GE Capital’s situation had become.

And just this week, Gordon Haskett analyst John Inch flagged a potential trouble spot within one of the more profitable parts of the finance unit – GE’s aircraft leasing arm. The division, which Inch sees as vulnerable to a pullback in the energy industry following a rival’s bankruptcy, has been the subject of intensifying deal speculation. In August, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund expressed interest in buying some or all of GE Capital Aviation Services, people familiar with the matter said.

While GE is hardly alone when it comes to the headaches caused by long-term care policies, it stands out because of the sheer size of its reserve deficit. Complicating matters is the fact that, as a reinsurer of roughly 300,000 long-term care policies, GE is on the hook for payouts tied to those policies but has no power to increase rates itself and must rely on the primary insurers to raise them. (Some are held by Genworth Financial, a GE unit spun off in 2004.)

[Moar at website]