Strengths Weaknesses Question 9 What do you consider to be the strengths and weaknesses of your organization? Since its inception in 1921, GAO's role as Congress' "watchdog" over Federal spending and programs has been continuously modified and strengthened by legislation and by the development of a highly professional and experienced workforce. GAO is recognized as a leader in the auditing and evaluation communities for its impartial, high-quality work. Strengths It has often been said that GAO's strongest asset is its people. GAO's staff is highly trained, multidisciplined and motivated. In fact, nearly forty percent of GAO's 4,970 employees have advanced degrees--a number that is likely to increase as an even larger percentage of our recent recruits have masters or doctorate degrees. In fact, GAO continues to attract exceptional recruits. During our last recruiting year, we received 26 applications for every position filled and were able to attract very bright and well prepared employees. For example, the average grade point average of our entry level hires was 3.6 on a 4 point scale. GAO employs a broad range of highly skilled individuals including accountants, engineers, scientists, public administrators, mathematicians, economists, sociologists, psychologists, and financial analysts. GAO's independence from the Executive Branch is another strength. The Congress wisely chose to provide the Comptroller General to be appointed for a 15 year term of office, from which he can be removed only by impeachment or joint resolution. This insulation has clearly helped GAO establish a reputation for excellence and impartiality in its work. Further, the Comptroller General's 15 year term of office also provides stable leadership that is missing in most Federal agencies. GAO's dedication to accuracy and objectivity is also a strength. GAO requires all of its audits and evaluations to be completed in accordance with professional audit standards (See attachment 8) which include requirements for the work to be performed by professionals who are free from financial and attitudinal bias. This compliance with these published professionally accepted audit standards encourages GAO to emphasize "hard evidence" in its work. GAO rarely relies on expert opinion as the principal support for conclusions. Instead, we rely heavily on data we gather ourselves. GAO also has rigorous quality control procedures (See response to question 8). Another significant strength is GAO's authority to have access to essentially all Federal records. This is important because Federal managers are not always willing to share information or data that could be used to measure their performance in meeting Congressional requirements. GAO's excellent reputation for impartial analysis and safeguarding sensitive information has also helped to encourage private sector organizations to voluntarily share sensitive data with GAO. GAO's organizational structure provides another strength. In addition to locating our staff at agencies in the Washington Metropolitan area, we have located roughly 1,700 (35 percent) of our staff away from Washington. These staff, in 14 regional offices across the United States, two international offices, and numerous smaller offices and audit sites gather evidence no matter where it is located. We can, and do, "kick the tires" by placing staff on location, thus permitting direct observation of events and collection of raw data. GAO sends teams into the field and assesses the effectiveness of government at the point of delivery of the programs, be it at a contractor's plant, at Strengths Weaknesses Question 9 a hospital delivering services to Medicare patients, at an IRS Service Center processing tax returns, or at a military installation training the troops. GAO's overview of essentially all government agencies is another strength. Unlike the Inspectors General, we can gather facts from all agencies and have the ability to see linkages between programs and issues and to develop broader proposals on how to improve the management of the government. GAO's work on financial management, leading to passage of the Chief Financial Officer's Act, is an example of how this perspective helps improve government. Another basic strength is GAO's ability to be responsive to the needs of congressional committees and members by trying to provide information in ways that are most helpful to them, be it through testimony, informal briefings for members and staff, formal chapter reports, or more streamlined briefing reports and fact sheets. In particular, our ability to testify before Congress has been greatly strengthened in the past decade. In fact, GAO testifies more frequently than all other agencies except the Department of Defense. GAO's size is another strength. Having nearly 5,000 employees allows us to devote enough resources to comprehensively look at the myriad problems that occur continuously throughout the Federal government. We are able to concentrate many of our staff in specific areas so that they are not always being transferred to new areas where they must relearn vast amounts of new information. Finally, GAO's reports, unless classified for national security reasons, are made available to the public. This helps assure that our work remains apolitical and accurate because the public serves as another check on our quality. Weaknesses Among the most troublesome weaknesses are (1) our inability to consistently provide information to the Congress in as timely a manner as possible, and (2) certain of our labor intensive, relatively cumbersome, internal processes, which lead to inefficiencies. We also, in our desire to be as responsive as we possibly can to each of our customers, probably try to undertake too many jobs at any one time given the number of staff we have and the complexity of many of the assignments requested. As indicated in our response to question 11, we have identified four key areas in which we will focus our efforts to improve. These areas include: improving the quality of our work and our processes, trying to better support various components of the organization in meeting the needs of the Congress and our other customers, and ⚫ increasing the value of GAO to the taxpayers by trying to assure that we do things efficiently and effectively and that our work results in improved government operations and dollar savings to the taxpayer. These areas are described more fully in question 11 and our March 1993 publication entitled Quality Improvement Plan: An Update Past Improvements Question 10 In what areas do you believe your organization has improved or failed to improve in the last 5 years? Operational and quality improvements During the last several years, we have initiated many changes to improve our efficiency and effectiveness of our work. Specifically, we have taken steps to better position ourselves to address events unfolding in the United States and around the world; build the issue-area expertise of our regional staff; streamline our headquarters and field organization; capitalize on developments in information resources, especially microcomputer technology; continually elicit, study, and implement ideas for improving our efficiency and effectiveness; strengthen our systems for assuring that our work is of high quality and meets professional standards; recruit highly talented employees, especially women and minorities; select and prepare many new managers to begin to succeed more senior managers who are expected to begin retiring; and manage our headquarters building and begin to modernize many of our facilities. Finally, and most important, we have made a concerted effort to further invest in our most important resource, our people, upon whose individual initiative and talent our success so heavily depends. Although we have begun to make some inroads into some of our more pressing problems, we still have a ways to go before we improve some of our traditional auditing and review processes which may be unnecessarily burdensome and time consuming; and channel all of our resources into the highest priority work. Anticipating Needs and Focusing our Work for Congress To respond to a growing work load, increase our responsiveness to the Congress, and position ourselves to effectively address rapid change in this country and throughout the world, we have taken action to better focus our efforts. To help us set our work priorities, we established guidelines in early 1990 designed to provide an appropriate mix of work and to optimize GAO's usefulness to the Congress. Specifically, we try to focus our resources on assignments having the potential to achieve at least one and preferably several, of the following objectives: • Contribute to congressional decisionmaking on significant public policy issues • Fulfill statutory and legislative requirements and commitments Identify and eliminate serious mismanagement, fraud, or abuse • Realize large dollar savings to the government and the taxpayers • Change policies, procedures, and management structures of major government programs to better achieve desired program results and/or achieve objectives at lower cost Past Improvements Question 10 • See that major government programs comply with applicable laws and regulations and that funds are spent legally • Ensure that funds of major government programs are accounted for accurately, and We have communicated these priorities to all GAO staff and consider them in reviewing each new job. This has undoubtedly helped us make better choices in the work we undertake and the way in which we manage our jobs. Nonetheless, as the demand for our assistance continues to grow, we need to constantly look for ways to refine and improve upon how we set our work priorities. Special Investigations In the mid 1980s it became increasingly clear that an office staffed by highly trained investigators, including those experienced in criminal cases, was necessary for us to be responsive to a special subset of our congressional request work load--jobs where violation of criminal laws was suspected or alleged. Consequently in 1986, with congressional encouragement, we established the Office of Special Investigations to enhance our ability to do investigative work. During the past 2 years this office has completed over 90 investigations, has enhanced our direct assistance to the Congress, and has become an important adviser and consultant on work in several high-risk areas Restructuring Our Organization to Fit Today's Environment During the past several years we have undertaken a number of initiatives to realign our organization, including (1) developing greater issue area expertise in our field staff, and (2) closing, combining, or consolidating a number of our smaller field offices and audit sites. An overriding objective in our operations has been to search out long-term efficiencies in the way we staff assignments. As a result, during the last few years we have taken actions, to develop a greater core of subject-matter expertise in our regional offices. Specifically we reduced the number of major issues upon which each field office focuses. Concurrently, we began testing ways to upgrade the issue-area expertise and job management skills of our field staff. We are also testing the placement in our regions of management-level staff whose only responsibility is to lead work in a specific programmatic area. Among these "issue area managers" are transfers from Washington, external recruits, or home-grown experts from our regions. They oversee a core staff dedicated to working in a single issue area and they direct all aspects of the work, including duties traditionally carried out only in our Washington headquarters. Because this is a relatively new initiative, we are just beginning to compile data on its results but initial indications suggest that it holds excellent promise for improving both the efficiency and timeliness of our work. Following the significant changes to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the general downsizing of the Deparment of Defense, we have reorganized our division responsible for our national security work so that it would be better equipped to focus on significantly changed issues and security problems in the post-cold war environment. We are also taking steps to strengthen our capabilities to address the state of management in the Federal government. This includes combining Past Improvements Question 10 our division responsible for accounting and financial management with the division responsible for information management and technology Capitalizing on Information Resources Technology As a result of efforts over the past several years to acquire desktop and portable microcomputers, we have met our goal of providing a microcomputer to every staff member who needed one. Two years ago we placed in operation an assignment tracking system that helps us to better follow the progress of our work and to emphasize key decision points in our work process. More recently, we have made great progress in our efforts to pilot a wide area network and develop network supported applications to improve our assignment process. This technology holds the potential to enhance greatly the ability of our geographically dispersed staff to respond to growing congressional information needs. Networking our microcomputers to create a national information highway will open up vast opportunities to share information and redesign our processes. Our communications capability has also been enhanced by initiatives to upgrade telephone services and to introduce video-teleconferencing to our headquarters and regional offices. These efforts were carried out in cooperation with the Architect of the Capitol. Furthermore, the changes in our telephone services give us communications compatibility with the Legislative Branch, significantly reduce costs, and provide our staff with new features, such as voice messaging and conferencing. Our video-teleconferencing experience began with a pilot between our headquarters and Seattle offices and was recently extended to include our San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Denver offices. It has illustrated that this technology can make a significant contribution to GAO's operations, particularly at a time when travel funding has been significantly reduced. We also have initiatives to (1) reduce the time required to publish reports and other documents, and (2) make a wide variety of information more accessible to GAO staff and its customers. Recruitment With a renewed emphasis on the importance of hiring the best, several years ago we centralized responsibility for managing all of GAO's recruitment activities within one office and have developed a highly successful campus executive program where 60 executives have been actively involved in developing and maintaining an ongoing relationship with selected colleges and universities. We revised recruiting materials to emphasize the professionalism and commitment to quality that we strive to attain at GAO. In addition, we made numerous changes to the recruiting process to gain efficiencies and to simplify the process for applicants. Training The broad scope of our work requires that senior managers and staff be familiar with a wide range of methodologies and be able to work effectively in interdisciplinary teams. To support them, we have made a substantial financial investment in training and education opportunities for all employees. Since establishing our Training Institute in 1988, we have developed many new courses for our employees, have completely revamped the technical curriculum for evaluators, and have developed new curriculum for attorneys. Major effort also has been devoted to supporting issue area training in fields such as financial management, information management, and logistics. New |