The U.S. Government Accountability Office says greater transparency could improve Worker Ratio reports in the CNMI. The NMI U.S. Workforce Act of 2018 requires the governor to report on the yearly ratio of U.S. to foreign workers. 

In a GAO report published this week, they pointed out that about a third of the data they received had “unknown visa types” in 2021. 

However, the “unknown” portion of workers is just 4% of the 2022 data after the NMI took steps to improve the process.

CNMI Secretary of Labor Leila Staffler said, “A lot of the things we did this year at Labor were to address some of those anomalies. When the law changed in 2018 there was one effort to do compliance outreach to businesses about the data and that’s specific to the W-2 form. One of the boxes there asks for the visa status and in 2018 there was one training and then the pandemic hit and there was never a training after that and so many businesses were not putting the correct visa data into that box.”

The NMI Labor Secretary says that’s part of the reason for the gaps. Since she entered the job a year ago, they’ve held additional training for businesses. 

The report recommended that the Department of the Interior work with the local government…to improve transparency. The report found that U.S. workers made up at least half of CNMI’s employed workers between 2018 and 2022.

“The ratio of U.S. workers has increased, but mainly because so many foreign workers has decreased. And so the amount of U.S. workers that are currently in the CNMI today compared to when we first started all of this in 2018, really hasn't changed that much. We really do need to increase our skilled workers that are U.S. but we need more workers in general. And if we can have more U.S. workers, we would need to recruit from U.S. places or train the U.S. people who are here to be skilled,” said Staffler. 

The full report can be found here.