Department’s Negotiated Rulemaking Process for Gainful Employment

The initial objective of our audit was to determine whether the Department had a process for handling embargoed regulations and protocols related to the protection of sensitive information for Department staff involved in the negotiated rulemaking process. A few months into our fieldwork, we determined that in order to adequately address concerns being raised by members of Congress and public interest groups, we needed to significantly expand the scope of our audit work to include communications that took place between Department officials and outside parties. We subsequently revised our audit objective. The revised objective of our audit was to determine whether the Department appropriately handled sensitive information during the negotiated rulemaking process, specifically between the end of the public negotiated rulemaking sessions in January 2010 and the publication of the NPRM in July 2010.