Job vulnerability assessment is a related method limited to identifying potential snags or staff that needs special assistance. A form of risk assessment, it concentrates on compliance, detection, and enforcement. For fraud or other abuses, “[a]n initial step is learning to recognize indicators of the presence of fraud or of the potential for it”.
The GAO analyzed fraud cases from 1976 to 1979 and found that federal employees were responsible for 29 percent of the attributable cases. Using a Delphi technique to pool expert judgments and statistical techniques to analyze responses, the GAO identified fifty-two factors affecting relative job exposure. The GAO’s method is not meant to predict the behavior of individual incumbents but to play the odds on certain jobs. It rests on a proportional relationship between problems and opportunities, all else held constant. For example, the position of food inspector ranked high on relative vulnerability among the jobs selected for evaluation. A poor “integrity record” (reported misconduct) or reputation did not appear to influence rankings in a test evaluation; the second-highest expo- sure was awarded another position with “an excellent integrity record”.