Chair asks about best efforts definition
Won asks how OCH decides whether a vendor made best efforts, who decides, and how it is reviewed. Harry says the framework comes from state law and is not one-size-fits-all; OCH looks for meaningful participation with the workforce system.
Under OCH's rules, a vendor that misses the community hiring goal is not out of compliance if it shows that it's made best efforts to find community hires.
A vendor that does not demonstrate best efforts can receive a notice of noncompliance on a penalty of $2,500 plus $1,000 per week for failing to take required corrective action.
How does OCH decide whether a vendor has made a best effort?
Who makes the decision and how is it?
reviewed and can you define best effort because we've seen this in contracting over and over again with bad actors and the vague language of best effort is extremely hard to define
yeah so the best efforts framework is rooted in the state legislation and so that language specifically comes from the state law
With that being said, one of the things that is unique to community hiring, which is not common across many types of structures, is our ability to actually assess penalties.
And as I mentioned earlier, the best efforts analysis is somewhat unique depending on the type of vendor, because vendors who have more resources have the ability to actually do more in terms of making best efforts.
It's not a one-size-fits-all, and we will continue to work with the vendors to make sure that those who are not meeting their goals are actually working with the Workforce One system,
posting their jobs publicly, meaningfully participating in events like hiring events and things like that.
And so there's not just like a check-the-box thing.
If you do this, this, and that, you'll make best efforts, and that's by design, right?
We want to make sure that vendors are meaningfully actually participating in.
The system.
And as you mentioned, the penalty framework does allow for, there's a penalty that allows to scale over time.
So if people are continually to flog the rules and not make best efforts and not work with us, the penalties can actually grow to quite a large amount.