CPM Student Projects

The Idaho Department of Correction lacked procedures and standards regarding compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), Title II. The Deputy Attorney General's office had pending actions from offenders against the department claiming discrimination under the act. These lawsuits are costly to litigate and create a fiscal liability if the offender prevails. ADA compliance is not difficult to accomplish when there are guidelines for staff to follow.

I used this project opportunity to develop a user's manual for the staff in the Reception and Diagnostic Unit at the Idaho State Correctional Institution to be used as a reference during offender assessment, including identifying disabilities recognized in the ADA and ensuring reasonable accommodations are made to enable the offender to participate in recommended habilitative programs. In addition, the guidelines are useful for staff who supervise an aging offender population.

Developed a hiring manual to introduce the reader to the concept of behavioral interviewing and to provide guidance in establishing a process to incorporate this concept into the ICOA's traditional interviewing process.

Traditional interviews normally focus mostly on what a job candidate has achieved, not how he or she achieved it. The interviewer's questions usually examine opinions, experiences, and feelings, as well as responses to hypothetical situations. However, none of these criteria truly provides any real indication of how the candidate performs his or her daily work. Thus, very little insight is gained regarding how someone will actually function if hired.

In contrast, the behavioral interview focuses on whether the candidate has certain core behavioral competencies related to the values, goals, and working style of the organization. To make this determination, the candidate is asked about specific critical incidents in his past that are related to the skills and abilities needed in the role he hopes to fill. The interviewer probes to clearly understand each incident, its results and, most importantly, the underlying behaviors used to manage that situation and achieve the outcome. The answers given should reveal that person's values, habits, attitudes, motives, and actual work style.

The goal of the project: To develop and implement an electronic, interactive sales and use tax code and rules training program for new and existing employees that will timely impart the needed knowledge about sales and use taxes, and which will also test and reinforce that knowledge. The Self-Paced Sales and Use Tax training system is designed to provide sales tax auditors, compliance staff, and taxpayer services representatives with a working knowledge of sales and use taxes shortly after they are hired, especially when classroom training will not be available for some time.

The training consists of 15 interactive slide shows, totaling about 1,000 slides, which cover the materials and quiz the student, plus 13 interactive quizzes which are designed to explain adn reinforce learning of the tax code and rules, and its intricacies.

Each employee will be able to take the training on their own computer, over a period of time, as their duties allow.

When the employee finishes a section of the slide show training, the employee can then take an interactive quiz that will test his or her commprehension of the materials, and also provide immediate feedback that will reinforce correct answers, and provide timely correction and feedback for areas not fully understood.

The employee may then review the online quiz with his or her supervisor, who will then make an appraisal on whether or not the employee has learned the law and rules well enough to preform the employee's function in this area.

When the training is completed, the employees being trained will have a working knowledge of the code and rules without having to wait for the formal sales and use classroom training.

This training has since been implemented on the Idaho Tax Commision's private INtranet, and is in fairly general use with new-hires. We have found it still very beneficial to have new employees attend our classroom training on sales taxes, but have also found that those employees who have taken the on-line classes have a much better understanding of the law and rules going into the classes than those without the training.