Who's teleworking? Government doesn't really know.

In 2010, the Office of Personnel Management set an aggressive goal of increasing the level of telework among federal employees by 50 percent, but officials don’t know how well they’re doing with it because of shortcomings in the way data about telework is collected, according to a recent report. OPM plans to test an automated system to gather telework data from agencies this year to get more complete and consistent data, rather than relying on agency estimates as in the past. But these changes also will make it difficult to compare the data with that from previous years, as required by the Telework Enhancement Act, according to the Government Accountability Office. “OPM officials have noted that this could limit OPM’s ability to report agency progress in its first report to Congress,” GAO said. It likely will be several years before there can be meaningful measurements of progress in moving federal workers out of the office.