An official state audit of Oregon’s Bureau of Labor and Industries (BOLI) confirms what labor commissioner Christina Stephenson has been saying for years to anyone who would listen: Her agency has been severely understaffed and underfunded. BOLI is in charge of enforcing dozens of wage and hour, civil rights and prevailing wage laws and overseeing state-registered apprenticeship programs. But state auditors say the agency is unable to keep up with its case load and that wronged workers can wait years to get the wages they’re owed or justice when their civil rights have been violated.
To investigate BOLI’s failures, the secretary of state’s office assigned four auditors. They spoke to more than 50 current and former BOLI employees in all divisions. They also spoke with “stakeholders” including legislators and the big business lobby group Oregon Business & Industry — though no one from organized labor, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office confirmed.
The audit gets very specific about some BOLI failings, including a backlog of 2,500 wage and hour complaints that had not yet been reviewed by BOLI’s five intake staff and 2,084 other wage and hour complaints that got through intake but had not yet been tackled by the agency’s nine investigators.
Over and over the audit blames “years of poor management and lack of staff” for those backlogs, but it never really untangles those two factors. Most of the agency’s failings are plainly the result of long-term budget starvation. It’s less clear how bad management contributed. The legislature had funded only nine investigators to police wage and hour laws for all of Oregon, but auditors spend much of the report chastising BOLI for lacking up-to-date procedure manuals.
And when it comes to solutions, the audit sometimes enters a thicket of management-speak. “BOLI needs to develop strategic strategies” is the gist of one recommendation.
Though it doesn’t identify former labor commissioner Val Hoyle by name, the audit seems to single out her administration for blame. When Hoyle’s administration “didn’t leave a transition plan or other documents that would help the new administration,” that was “poor management,” the auditors wrote, and it undermined the agency’s mission. Not only that, but nearly all of BOLI’s senior management jumped ship months before Stephenson came into office, and deputy director Duke Shepard left two weeks into Stephenson’s administration. Shepard, who was once the political director of the Oregon AFL-CIO, now works for Oregon Business & Industry. [Editor’s note 12/5/25: Auditors said they interviewed more than 50 current and former BOLI employees, but neither Shepard nor Hoyle were contacted.]
It was Stephenson herself who requested the top-to-bottom audit, and in her official response to it she expressed thanks for its recommendations.
“The recommendations identify areas that we have been working on diligently for nearly three years but have not been able to fully complete because we lack the necessary resources,” Stephenson wrote. “Many of the deficits identified are a direct reflection of the fact that the leaders of this agency have been laboring in an environment of extreme scarcity.”
In an effort to build back BOLI after long-term neglect and malnourishment, Stephenson fought for and won funding for 46 additional positions this year. Stephenson expects the backlog to gradually diminish as new staff comes on board.
READ THE FULL REPORT AND RESPONSE HERE.
