Oversight Committee Releases Agency Responses on Federal Management IT Systems
WASHINGTON- House Oversight and Government Reform Committee leaders today released the results of a comprehensive survey of federal agency management information technology systems. In March, Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., chairman of the committee, joined subcommittee chairmen Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, Rep. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Rep. Todd Platts, R-Pa., in requesting management information from 26 federal agencies. Click here to read a copy of the letter.
“Our analysis shows these systems are not serving taxpayers well,” Issa said.
According to analysis produced by Oversight Committee staff, “agencies employ a tangled web of disparate manual processes to generate the data.” Staff also found that agencies did very little to make the data tracked by the management IT systems publicly available.
Chairman Issa has made the agency responses available for public review online in their entirety here.
“In making the agency responses publicly available, we believe we can gain greater insight into the problems that keep federal management systems so opaque,” Issa said.
Issa has introduced the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2011 (DATA Act), which will transform the successful Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and apply its system government-wide to track all federal spending, including grants, contracts, loans and agencies’ internal expenses, using consistent reporting standards and data identifiers, and making all of the information available to the public.
A preliminary staff analysis is enclosed below. Click here to read a copy of the letter. Click here to view the results.
Significant Findings from Federal Agency Management IT Response Letters
Background
• On March 8, 2011, Chairmen Issa, Jordan, Lankford, and Platts sent a letter to the chief financial officers of 26 federal agencies asking 23 detailed questions about those agencies’ management IT systems. The letter asked each agency to identify its financial management / accounting, grants management, and contracts management systems, and explain how they interact with one another. The letter also asked agencies to describe their efforts to make spending and financial data public – both on their own websites and on USASpending.gov.
• The 26 responses comprise 329 pages of detailed description.
• The responses of three agencies – the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of the Interior, and the Department of Energy – were the subject of a hearing of the Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and Procurement Reform on July 14, 2011.
Manual Processes
• Federal agencies frequently use manual processes to transfer information between IT systems.
o 21 of 26 agencies responding reported the widespread use of manual processes in reporting systems.
o The Department of the Interior uses manual processes in almost every step of its financial reporting.
o The Department of Veterans Affairs has established an office, known as the Data Quality Service (DQS), tasked with manually transferring information among various IT systems.
• Manual processes are inherently problematic, but agencies did not report significant efforts to eliminate them.
o Manual processes are slow, inefficient, expensive, and conducive to human error.
o On July 14, 2011, Federal CIO Vivek Kundra testified before the Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and Procurement Reform that agencies should “[a]utomate [the] transfer of data between systems to increase productivity, protect data integrity, and speed data dissemination.”
o Agencies were asked to describe their modernization efforts, but did not report significant efforts to eliminate manual processes.
Public Availability of Data
• The agencies’ responses reveal very few agency-level efforts to make financial information – particularly the data tracked by the management IT systems – publicly available.
o At least 10 of 26 agencies did not provide sufficient answers to Oversight questions on the public availability of management IT data – even though some of these described their management IT systems in detail.
o Other agencies responded that they do not make any financial information public. For example, the Department of Transportation, does not publicly report any of its grants, loans, or contracts.
o The Small Business Administration reports very limited information on grants and loans, and has no reporting of contracts.
o Every agency is required to report grants and contracts data to the government-wide databases that feed USASpending.gov. However, the Sunlight Foundation has found that USASpending.gov’s grants data to be only 35% reliable, and the Congressional Research Service has raised serious questions about the accuracy of USASpending.gov’s contracts data.
o A few agencies make management IT data publicly available on their own websites.
Lack of Standardization
• As Chairman Issa and other experts have long argued, there should be one standard method for reporting financial data across agencies. The responses demonstrate that this is not the case. Instead, agencies employ a tangled web of disparate manual processes to generate the data, rarely make it publicly available, and rely on USASpending.gov.
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