PAD 599 Conclusion Paper

Introduction

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is our nation’s most important agency which we as citizens rely on for consistency. It is because this very meaningful work that their budget must be very demanding as well as costly. To ensure that the GAO is investing their budget wisely, they must ensure their efforts to promote the efficiency and program recommendations are fiscally responsible.

Budget Overview

The GAO is mainly identified as independent agency, only having to report to Congress every Fiscal Year with a Performance & Accountability Report. The GAO’s executive committee prepares their financial statements and reports that are reviewed and assessed that will often go into the Performance Report. With the Performance Report the Chief Financial Officer, will report on how the GAO has successfully gone above and beyond budgeting operations.

It is still a federally funded agency, and responsible for many programs the classification code within the federal budget is 005-0107-0-1-0-801. The GAO’s primary job is to support the Congress in meeting its constitutional responsibilities and to help enhance the performance and ensure the accountability of the Federal Government for the benefit of the American people.

Budget Assessments

There are so many political influences that the GAO has taken part of. After reviewing FY2012, it was astounding to seeing the agency categorizes their benefits into financial and non-financial. I found the non-financial benefits to be more informative, because they seemed to be of a discretionary measure to the public.

One major political influence in a primary accountability area was within the Social Security Administration (SSA). The GAO had found that measures were not taken to implement a backlog for appeal cases for disability clients. The GAO recommended that the SSA develop goals and measures, and identify risks and steps to address those cases. Therefore eliminating and reducing the backlog, and successfully helping those clients. (GAO PAR 2012 Fig. 11)

Another political influence that had a major political influence during FY2012 was when program administrators reported that Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was not using the best approach to collect all the unpaid taxes. The IRS relied primarily on the public’s voluntary approach, and that simply was not working. The GAO recommended that the IRS prioritize and reassign their case approach to a more successful case process. Therefore implementing the tax collection process at a higher rate. (GAO-PAR 2012 Figure)

Analysis of Budgeting Plans and Actual Expenditures

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) influences the budgetary decisions for current and future budget line items given to the GAO. Since the GAO is a part of the four central financial agencies, the OMB has the supervisory role in analyzing the GAO’s budgets and expenditures for a given fiscal year.

Furthermore, the federal budget line items I researched just included the program and salaries. The OMB includes the prior, present, and future fiscal year within the budget. By working closely with the GAO, the OMB integrates performance goals and measures into the budget process.

Implications of Foreign Policy

International policy making may not seem to sound like it would impact the GAO’s current budget or its future budget but it does. After reviewing the GAO’s 2016 Performance & Accountability Report, and the GAO’s 2018 Fiscal Request it was clear to see where the funding was invested. Under the GAO’s second goal “Respond to Changing Security Threats and the Challenges of Global Interdependence” (GAO-17-1SP) that we can it in detail stated they are responsible for reporting on the following:

· Oversight of Humanitarian Aid to Syria

· Addressing Southwest Border Security

· Combatting Nuclear Smuggling

· Proposing Data on Proposed Assistance to Palau

· Enhancing National Bio Surveillance Capacity

· Reducing Migration of Unaccompanied Children from Central America

Those are just a few issues the GAO must address and report on to Congress. Within my review, some of these challenges required additional funding than others. Raising the numbers of the future years budget lines.

Budget Request and Recommendations

One of my recommendations to the GAO would be to improve data centers used to assess and collect their reports. If a budget request were made to enhance their technology, and allow them to save funding over the course of time. “The Government Accountability Office has called on Congress to consider a possible extension to the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act‘s data center optimization and consolidation provisions in order to provide federal agencies more time to meet the Office of Management and Budget‘s performance targets and cost savings objective.

GAO made the recommendation after it found that 22 out of 24 agencies mandated to take part in OMB’s Data Center Optimization Initiative reported minimal progress in meeting the agency’s five performance targets for fiscal 2018, the agency said in a report released Wednesday.

These targets include virtualization, server utilization and automated monitoring, energy metering, facility utilization and power usage effectiveness.

The report also showed that of the 22 agencies, 17 of them lacked plans to satisfy the OMB metrics by Sept. 30, 2018, which is a day before the FITARA provisions for data center consolidation expire on Oct. 1, 2018.

The congressional watchdog also found that 18 of the 24 DCOI-covered agencies had not fully deployed automated monitoring platforms to measure server utilization.

GAO urged those agencies to develop and submit plans to OMB to facilitate the implementation of such monitoring tools for data centers.”

Another recommendation would make to the GAO would be to implement new computers or devices that would enable them to go paperless. Therefore, saving the agency any money on reports that may still be generated. These devices could also be costing the agency money, because they are outdated and not sufficient to what the agency requires.