Treasury official calls for quick Data Act demos

The three-year schedule to implement the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, a measure that puts federal financial data on a single, machine-readable standard and requires its publication to the public online, might be too ambitious, said Dick Gregg, fiscal assistant secretary of the Treasury and the executive in charge of implementing the law.

"It will be difficult and maybe impossible in some areas to hit all the timelines," Gregg said on May 20 at the Federal Financial Management Conference in Washington, D.C., before an audience of government accountants and financial managers who will be on the front lines of implementing the changes required under the Data Act.

The challenge is for Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget to come up with a standard for publishing financial data, then convert federal financial management systems to that standard. There was no money included in the law to finance the effort, but agencies will surely need some resources to implement changes.

"I'm not sure what the approach of OMB will be when agencies make requests," Gregg said. "There will be some costs. It's important to work together to figure out how to minimize the cost of doing this." One way is to leverage gains made in the Treasury's own internal goal of improving financial transparency through the management of the USASpending.gov website, which recently moved to Treasury from OMB as part of the fiscal 2014 budget.

The shift to a federal-first approach to agency financial management could help streamline the process, Gregg pointed out. "Shared services is a force multiplier," Gregg said, because consolidation of financial management at the four providers means that agencies will be able to outsource some of their compliance. "The sooner we can move more agencies into shared services, the easier it's going to be for them to implement the Data Act," Gregg said.

The financial management community will reap the benefits as well, Gregg said. The new emphasis on standardization means that chief financial officers can shift from systems implementation and operation to the more interesting and rewarding work of managing programs.

-Adam Mazmanian, FCW.com
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Treasury figuring out how the shared services pieces fit into governmentwide puzzle

Over the next few months, answers to some of the most pressing questions about how financial management shared services will work must be clarified.

The Office of Management and Budget, the Treasury Department and the CFO Council are trying to plug the holes in the shared services process that thwarted the effort a decade ago.

Whether it's ensuring the four current civilian agency shared service providers or the new ones OMB expects to name in the coming weeks have the capacity to take on large agencies, or whether it's the role of the private sector in this latest effort, or whether it's the process by which Treasury will work with customer agencies to determine which shared service provider is most suitable and make sure there is lasting governance, reducing the amount of uncertainty about how version 2 of financial management shared services will work is among the administration's top priorities over the next six months.

In part three of the special report, Shared Services Revisited, Federal News Radio explores how OFIT is putting the pieces in place to create a successful shared services program.

OMB reintroduced the concept of shared services for financial management systems in March 2013. 

The White House issued a memo creating a federal-first policy when agencies upgrade their financial systems.

Over the last year, OFIT and OMB have slowly been putting the processes together to smooth out some of the long-standing problems.

In the mid-2000s under the George W. Bush administration, OMB introduced this concept of shared services, offering both public and private sector options. Large agencies mostly opted out of initiative, instead deciding to upgrade their systems on their own. OMB said mostly small agencies took advantage of the shared service providers.

But after a series of failed financial management projects at large agencies, and the fact that OMB estimates agencies are spending $8 billion a year for the operation, maintenance and upgrade of these financial systems, the administration decided to push through with another attempt at shared services.

-Jason MIller, FederalNewsRadio.com
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OMB Releases Federal Grant Reform Guidance

OMB and the Council on Financial Assistance Reform (COFAR) are pleased to inform you that today the Federal Register will file for online public inspection reforms to OMB Guidance entitled "Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards." The guidance will be published in the December 26th edition of the Federal Register.

Please join us on Friday, December 20, 2013, at 11:45 a.m. for a COFAR webcast on the new guidance. Please visit www.cfo.gov/cofar for more information and to register for the webcast. Questions may be submitted to COFAR@omb.eop.gov.

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For Federal CFOs, the Pressure is on

Do you feel like the frog being boiled? Only four years ago, it was cool to be in government again – but now the pot’s boiling on extra high. The heat continues to rise with the taxpayers’ distrust of the management and stewardship of their money; whether it’s anything from ballooning deficits to irksome conference spending – the federal CFO community is in the thick of things. And the view from the bunker is not pretty either, as we emerge from the turbulence of continuing resolutions, threats of government shutdowns, whilst still toiling away under the cloud of sequestration. And do not forget what we all did to make the execution of the Recovery Act a success with transparency in reporting and very little instances of fraud, waste, and abuse?

As we approach the presidential election and despite recent history and events, there has been somewhat of a hiatus from new management initiatives – but expect this to change quickly (no matter who wins the election) with a newly invigorated administration, some severe externalities hanging over us, and a backlog of legislative proposals aimed at improving how the government spends its money. The federal CFO community will continue to experience increasing pressure and demands to keep performing with ever eroding levels of resources. I see that these challenges are starting to drive an emerging agenda for the federal CFO to address and work on over the next handful of years. So, here are four of the bigger things I see on the agenda:

1. Maintain the measure of fiscal integrity;
2. Build a relentless focus on cost management;
3. Mitigate severe human capital risks; and
4. Find capital to invest in new business systems (or find someone else to run them).

-Owen Barwell, GovExec.com
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Federal Drive Interviews -- Oct. 10, 2012

Denise Wu — partner, Clifton Larson Allen

A group of financial experts is working to make federal spending more understandable and transparent to the public. The Office of Federal Financial Management and the Chief Financial Officers Council has moved the idea of a Statement of Spending to the front burner.

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AGA Releases White Paper: CFO Act 20 Years Later

ALEXANDRIA, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--On March 17, 2011, AGA sponsored a CFO Act Summit to hear thoughts and ideas on lessons learned and reforms/improvements related to the CFO Act 20 years after it became law. Participating in the Summit were members of the joint Chief Financial Officers Council (CFOC)/Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) working group that will report to Congress this summer on recommended changes to the CFO Act. The CFO Summit agenda was comprised of three panels focused on different topic areas related to implementation of the CFO Act. The central question raised to the group at the beginning of the Summit was: What, if any, statutory changes are needed to enhance the CFO Act and improve federal financial management?


View the white paper detailing the Summit dialogue at:

www.agacgfm.org/downloads/CFOWhitePaper.pdf.

FSIO has ceased operations effective March 31, 2010

Effective April 1, 2010, the Financial Systems Integration Office (FSIO) is closed. This web site will remain available until May, 1, 2010. The FSIO documents now located on this web site will be transferred to the CFO Council web site - www.cfoc.gov on or before May 1, 2010. For further assistance, please contact the Office of Management and Budget, Office of Federal Financial Management.

For more information, please read the attached memo from Danny Werfel, Controller, Office of Federal Financial Management (OFFM), Office of Management and Budget. After March 31st, please contact OFFM at 202-395-3993 on core financial system requirements, use cases and other federal financial management issues.

CFOC Posts updates to the Master Agency Financial System Inventory

Download the latest inventory document here.

CFOs Need Money, Not Just Mandates

The stimulus bill will pump a lot of money into agencies, with a lot of mandates to put into action. But money to implement what the plan includes isn't there. Linda Springer, Executive Director of Industry and Knowledge at Ernst & Young and former Director of the Office of Personnel Management, talked about what that means for the CFO Council, and how they can help themselves.

Listen Here

CFO Academy Seeking Faculty

The U.S. Government CFO Academy sponsored by the CFO Council and Department of Defense (DoD) is recruiting applicants for two faculty positions in Government Financial Management and Leadership. The Academy, located at the National Defense University in Washington, provides accredited graduate education for mid-level managers leading to the CFO Leadership Certificate.

Please visit usajobs.gov.

For more details about the CFO Academy contact Elizabeth McDaniel at 202.685.3884 or Jackie Durkee at 202.685.2169.

Agencies get glimpse of the future of grants management

Agencies have been trying to streamline and improve the grants process for decades. There have been laws, administration initiatives and even grassroots efforts, but progress has been slow.

But now Tom Cooley, chairman of the Chief Financial Officer's Council's Grants Policy Committee, says there is more hope than ever that significant changes are coming to the processes that hand out more than $500 billion a year federal grants.

The policy committee developed a strategic plan in late fiscal 2008 and came out with an implementation plan a few months later.

Cooley, who also is the National Science Foundation's chief financial officer, says these two plans are setting the agenda of where agencies are going in the short, medium and long terms.

"The implementation plan is where the rubber meets road," he says. "We have products we are working on and we have a timetable to get to them. We will get many of the short-term ones done and out the door in the next year or two."

The implementation plan focuses on two main areas: streamlining the pre-award, post-award and audit processes, and improving overall grant stewardship.

Some of the short-term goals include establishing governmentwide guidance for grants payment standards, and developing uniform format for reporting performance on federally funded research projects.

The committee's mid-term goals include establishing governmentwide standards for format and content of grant and cooperative agreements as well as standards for audits of state and local governments and non-profits.

Long-term goals include developing a governmentwide grants management certification program, and a grants management workforce database, which captures and tracks employees performance and training.

Cooley says mid-term goals are 3-to-5 years out and long-term goals will take more than five years.

-Jason Miller, FederalNewsRadio.com
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C-Change

Now that President Obama is in office, many are wondering what is going to change for those C-Level positions in the federal government. One of those jobs is that of the Chief Financial Officer. Samuel Mok is the National President of the Association of Government Accountants. He's was also a CFO at the Department of Labor and the Treasury Department. He's with us now to talk about whether the role of the CFO should change.

Listen Here

CFO Council Publications Available

The Chief Financial Officer's Councils posted several new publications to its website in January, including:

OMB Circular No. A-123, Appendix B, Improving the Management of Government Charge Card Programs - 1/15/2009

Circular A-127 - 1/9/2009

Circular A-127, Implementation Guidance for the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act - 1/9/2009

Improving the Accuracy and Integrity of Federal Payments - 1/8/2009

CFO academy to begin this fall

The National Defense University’s Information Resources Management College will offer management and leadership courses this fall through a new Chief Financial Officer Academy. The academy, which will draw students from the federal financial community, has been endorsed by the Federal CFO Council, said Robert Childs, senior director of NDU’s IRM College.

The courses will lead to a certificate in CFO leadership.

The certificate program was the idea of Linda Combs, a former Office of Management and Budget controller, who retired from government last year, said Elizabeth McDaniel, dean of faculty and academic programs at the college.

The college is hiring a couple of faculty members on detail from federal agencies and is hiring an additional faculty member, McDaniel said.

The academy will offer eight courses, including courses in financial management, portfolio management and government business transformation, which students can complete in four years.

McDaniel said the college also will soon announce that it plans to offer its first master of science degree in Government Strategic Leader, with a specialization in CIO management, information assurance and possibly government financial management.

The academy, located on the NDU campus at Fort Lesley J. McNair in Washington, will offer courses beginning in September.

-Florence Olsen, FCW.com
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GSA details acquisition system requirements

The General Services Administration is seeking comments on a draft document that details the functional and technical requirements and data standards for federal acquisition and contract writing systems. The document is the first step in a long-term plan to integrate acquisition and financial management functions, GSA said.

GSA will revise the Federal Acquisition System Requirements document based on comments from industry and agencies and as processes and data standards are aligned within the acquisition environment and with the Financial Management Line of Business governmentwide consolidation initiative, Thurston said.

GSA’s Financial Systems Integration Office, which manages FM LOB, has published a series of financial management system requirements documents that specify the functional and technical requirements that all financial management systems must meet to comply with federal standards.

The Chief Acquisition Officers Council and Chief Financial Officers Council requested the acquisition requirements document to start the process of integrating acquisition and financial management functions. The Acquisition Requirements Team, comprised of representatives from both organizations, drafted the requirements.

The document provides a framework for connecting program planning, contractor registration, financials, and a set of management processes with agencies' acquisition systems in order to deliver fully integrated acquisition suppor, GSA said, adding that they incorporate required system interfaces such as the Federal Procurement Data System and Central Contractor Registration.

-Mary Mosquera, FCW.com

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New rules help balance books on transactions between agencies

Federal agencies can’t account for $58 billion of what they bought from each other in 2007. That may be alarming, but it beats the figure of two years prior when agencies were $91 billion out of balance.

The improvement reflects the impact of new accounting rules put in place in 2005.

“The business rules were the first attempt we had at trying to standardize, and we’re starting to see some progress,” said Robert Reid, deputy assistant Treasury secretary for accounting policy, during an April 17 panel discussion.

Agencies buying goods and services from each other have long struggled to square their balance sheets.

Governmentwide rules requiring standard accounting procedures for intragovernmental agreements have helped ensure agencies are able to reconcile their books more often, said Reid and a panel of government financial management leaders assembled by the National Academy of Public Administration.

“If you get it right from the start, there is a lot less of a chance that it will be unreconciled on the back end,” said John Cox, chief financial officer for the Housing and Urban Development Department. Cox and Reid have been among the leaders of a group working to solve the government’s intragovernmental transaction problems.

Keeping agencies’ books in balance is important because when they don’t accurately account for the money passed between them neither agency knows how much it has at its disposal to achieve the mission, said Danny Werfel, the Office of Management and Budget’s acting controller.

OMB and the Treasury Department created a watch list of high-dollar-value transactions that are the most out of balance. Agencies having transactions on the list, which OMB started in 2006 and which is not public, meet with OMB and Treasury to discuss the causes of the imbalance and take corrective action, Werfel said.

The corrective actions taken as a result of the watch list have knocked $10 billion off the government’s unresolved intragovernmental accounts, Werfel said.

Despite these improvements, intragovernmental transactions remain a material weakness on the government’s books, preventing the government’s consolidated financial audit from getting a clean rating, Werfel said.

The next step toward achieving that goal is standing up an intragovernmental dispute resolution committee to handle unsettled claims between agencies that can’t be resolved in another setting, Werfel said. Chief financial officers would moderate for the parties in dispute to work out agreements to settle the accounts, he said. Werfel hopes to have the council set up by the end of September, which is the end of fiscal 2008.

The final step is much further down the road — an information technology system that would permit agencies to make intragovernmental transactions automatically within the standard business processes.

“We won’t solve this problem unless we ultimately use technology,” Cox said.
Agencies need to find a Web-based tool to bridge the differences for their more than 250 financial management systems, Cox said.

-Elise Castelli, FederalTimes

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Delayed Conversation

The feds don’t spend much time hashing out mutual problems with states and localities. It’s time they started.

What do you call it when eight federal officials and eight state and local leaders convene voluntarily to discuss intergovernmental fiscal affairs? Well, if you’ve watched the downward trajectory that has characterized intergovernmentalism in Washington over the past decade or so, you might call it a minor miracle.

But last month, that’s just what happened. A 16-member panel whose leaders included Danny Werfel, acting director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and Martin Benison, the Massachusetts state controller, sat down to develop plans for a new standing group that will focus on how the three levels of government might work more rationally through the broad range of intergovernmental fiscal issues that leave state and local officials alternatively exasperated, confused and, on some days, entertaining notions of open rebellion.

The effort, which is being called the “Partnership for Intergovernmental Management and Accountability,” is being jointly sponsored by the Association of Government Accountants and the Chief Financial Officers Council, a group made up of the top fiscal officials from the 24 largest federal agencies.

The partnership has a wide range of issues and activities it might tackle, from serving as a forum for sharing best practices in fiscal management to working through proposed rules and regulations for specific federal grants and transfer programs.

The partnership emerged out of what might seem an unlikely issue: the Bush administration’s concern about “improper payments” that the feds might have made to states and localities. Relmond Van Daniker, the executive director of the Association of Government Accountants, didn’t think the prospect of federal liens against states and localities due to perceived overpayments was a very practical investment of federal time or energy. “That just wasn’t going to work,” says Van Daniker. “What we really need is to get states, locals and feds talking to one another again.”

The partnership does have one important thing going for it: Those who are represented by AGA and the CFO Council clearly are getting tired of all the confusion and conflict when it comes to intergovernmental fiscal affairs. This potentially powerful source of grassroots and high-level discontent just might hold the new partnership together.

-Jonathan Walters, Governing.com
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FedCFO.com Milestone - 1000 Posts

FedCFO.com achieved an impressive milestone today in posting the 1000th article associated with Federal financial management and the concerns of the Federal CFO community.

Since its inception in January 2005, FedCFO.com has become an important aggregator of information from the public domain pertaining to Federal financial management from sources such as: Government Accountability Office (GAO), Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Financial Systems Integration Office (FSIO), U.S. Chief Financial Officer's Council (CFOC), U.S. Treasury, Association of Government Accountants (AGA), American Society of Military Comptrollers (ASMC), Federal Financial Managers Council (FFMC), Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB), Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB), American Association for Budget and Program Analysis (AABPA), Federal Computer Week, Federal News Radio, Government Computer News, Federal Times, Government Executive, Washington Technology, CFO Magazine, Washington Post, and many more.

In addition, FedCFO.com provides a custom Google search engine for Federal financial management topics to help its users find specific topical information while excluding the extraneous data that is included with standard web searches.

CFOs, IGs share best practices for financial reports

Agency chief financial officers and inspectors general have developed a set of best practices to share for coordinating the preparation and audit of annual federal financial statements. A key point is to start early.

The CFO Council and the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency produced the guide to promote clear expectations defined early and often, continuous communication and a shared commitment to improve agency financial management.

An agency CFO prepares the financial statement according to federal accounting principles and also evaluates the use of internal controls to assure financial management under the Office of Management and Budget’s Circular A-123. The IG audits the financial statement to give an opinion about its reliability based on the management of risk of its internal controls, states the report, posted Oct. 1.

Agencies must submit their audited financial statements and Performance and Accountability Reports (PARs) by Nov. 15 to OMB, the Treasury Department and the Government Accountability Office.

The CFO and IG organizations recommend that agencies start early with planning discussions in January and field work beginning in March to avoid herculean catch-up near the end of the federal fiscal year. Agencies should develop draft financial statements and PARs by Sept. 30, the groups said.

-Mary Mosquera, FCW.com

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Commentary: Fixing a $100B problem

How do we attempt to reduce the $100 billion interagency out-of-balance problem?

It may appear to be an arcane federal government accounting topic, but it is a problem that we can and must solve.

To that end, Ken Carfine, fiscal assistant secretary of the Treasury Department, and I are working as co-leads on the Central Reporting Team working group under the Chief Financial Officers Council.

All federal agencies trade with one another. We each keep track of what we procure. Virtually all of the 24 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies get an individual clean audit opinion. But we frankly don’t do a good job of reconciling what we spend with one another. Many of us spend an enormous amount of time and effort trying to get our intergovernmental transactions to balance. It is a struggle for agencies to even locate the right people to respond to requests for help in resolving these issues at other agencies.

There are three primary types of interagency activity. The first, including fiduciary balances, is created when one agency manages funds or borrowings on behalf of another. The second happens when agencies are required to transfer funds between them by agreement or statute. The third major category is created when agencies buy and sell goods and services with each other.

So how do we try to solve this material issue? First, we create awareness and thus accountability for fixing the problem. We have added a watch list for agencies that have either large or chronic out-of-balance issues with their trading partners. The Office of Management and Budget will soon require corrective action plans from those agencies. Regular reporting will occur at the CFO Council meetings. The Treasury Department, working with various agencies, has already reduced fiduciary differences by several billion dollars.

Second, we are addressing the root causes that create the out-of-balance situations. These can arise due to timing differences, different accounting treatment of the same item, lack of notification and communication. We are working to improve the detailed level of reporting to provide a better starting point for reconciliation. Agency use and enforcement of the Intergovernmental Business Rules issued in October 2006 will serve as good business protocols for trading partners.

Third, we will address business process changes that need to occur in order to reduce the problems. This may require improvements to the existing technology to process the workflow. Notice I did not say we have to build a new multihundred million-dollar system to tackle this problem. We realize the current information technology budget realities and the fact that many agencies have legacy systems that will live for a long time to come. We are closely monitoring a pilot project at one of the largest federal agencies to see what application, if any, it can have on the larger universe of agencies. Using Web-based technologies, combined with improved and automated business processes, will greatly reduce the out-of-balance items in the first place and the workload required in the event an out-of-balance occurs.

Our goal is to have an initial set of recommendations to the CFO Council by next spring. These improvements should dovetail with other council efforts to standardize governmentwide accounting practices and modernize systems.

-John Cox, CFO, HUD, Published on FederalTimes.com

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