The Labor Department’s Office of the Inspector General will probe the agency’s registered apprenticeship system to determine if it violated federal appropriations law, the OIG announced Oct. 21.
The audit comes after Democratic lawmakers expressed concerns that the DOL may have misspent funding reserved for registered apprenticeships to carry out a top White House priority to create a new “industry-recognized apprenticeship program” model. The new IRAPs, which will be established in an upcoming final regulation, are intended to complement the decades-old registered system by handing industry groups and unions more control of their own apprenticeship systems to expand the job ...