Despite the Dept. of Labor's efforts to improve its process for determining Davis-Bacon Act prevailing wages, it continues to produce potentially inaccurate data, according to the Government Accountability Office.

A March 22 GAO report finds that Labor's wage survey has shortcomings in how timely and representative the information is and in using local data as the basis for wage calculations. Among surveys reviewed by GAO, Labor issued 11% of key wage rates at the county level, 42% at the multi-county level and 40% at the state level. More than 25% of rates were based on six or fewer workers.

GAO suggests amending the Davis-Bacon law to allow information from areas other than “civil subdivisions of states.”