How CXOs can close the value-proposition gap

Federal financial managers received some shrewd advice last week. Stop talking like financial managers.

Stop talking about clean opinions. Don’t talk about material weaknesses. You don’t need to mention the CFO Act or the Digital Accountability and Transparency (DATA) Act.

With new leaders coming in across every agency, federal financial managers, instead, should focus on value and mission support.

Adam Goldberg, the executive architect at the Treasury Department’s Financial Innovation and Transformation (FIT), said by focusing on how the CFO’s office furthers the agency’s mission, agency budget and financial management executives can change the conversation about back-office functions.

Richard Haley, the FBI CFO, said his folks have to communicate in the language that agents and leaders use every day. He said they shouldn’t have to work hard to understand financial management initiatives.

Goldberg said it’s about shifting the conversation to talk about what the agency needs to better support agency operations.

The point of the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), for example, aims to close the gap between IT, acquisition and mission areas. It forces the chief information officer into discussions about planning and procuring mission critical technology.

In the human resources world, we’ve heard about chief human capital officers begging and pleading mission area hiring managers to make decisions, review applications and are involved in every step of the process. The Office of Personnel Management issued guidance in November stressing the need to engage and empower hiring managers.

The idea behind all of these efforts is to break down the siloes that have built up over time for probably no real reason, creates layers of inefficiency and leads to the perception of a stilted bureaucracy and inefficiency.

Treasury is trying to help agencies remove these barriers for the financial management folks. The department is developing a maturity model to help agencies think about how their CFO offices are impacting mission beyond just “being the money people.”

-Jason Miller, FederalNewsRadio.com
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IG: Justice Department shows leadership for DATA Act rollout, but gaps remain

The Justice Department is on schedule to meet the DATA Act implementation deadline — sort of.

DOJ’s Office of Inspector General recently issued a review of the department’s progress toward standardizing its financial spending  reports, and according to the internal watchdog, “nothing came to our attention that caused us to believe that a material modification should be made” to Justice’s plans to meet the May 2017 deadline.

But the IG did note “areas of concern that potentially could impact the department’s ability to most effectively meet all the requirements within the requisite timeframe.”

Those areas of concern range from completing a full inventory, mapping and gap analysis of the department to an incomplete data extraction standard.

The inspector general looked at the first four steps of the eight-step plan recommended by the Treasury Department for DATA Act implementation. Treasury and the Office of Management and Budget are the agencies spearheading the work.

Within the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act is a requirement that agency IGs report on the law’s implementation. The first set of reports was due in November, however, the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE) recommended last December that because the spending data would not be available for November 2016, that the first required reports be due November 2017, with additional reports in 2019 and 2020.

According to the review, the Department has three financial systems: the Unified Financial Management System (UFMS); the Financial Management Information System 2 (FMIS2), a legacy financial system; and the Systems, Applications, and Products (SAP) system.

Instead of inventorying these systems, DOJ inventoried the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) procurement information in UFMS and an initial inventory of the Office of Justice Programs’ (OJP) grant award information in FMIS2 — with the hope that the lessons learned could be applied to the other financial systems.

-Meredith Sommers, FederalNewsRadio.com

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OMB’s latest DATA Act guidance highlights PII, financial assistance

Personally identifiable information and data “validity” are the focus of the Office of Management and Budget’s latest DATA Act guidance.

In a Nov. 6 memo to agencies, OMB delves into detail for reporting certain types of federal financial assistance and awards under the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act.

The guidance does not change or affect any existing policy, OMB clarifies, but does “further [specify] (1) responsibilities for reporting financial information for awards involving Intragovernmental Transfers (IGTs), (2) guidance for reporting financial assistance award records containing personally identifiable information (PII), and (3) guidance for agencies to provide the Senior Accountable Official (SAO) assurance over quarterly submissions to USASpending.gov,” the memo states.

According to the latest guidance, two types of intragovernmental transfers are included under DATA Act reporting: allocation transfers and buy/sell transactions.

OMB directs agencies that starting with their first DATA Act reporting on allocation transfers, the agency will “submit and assure the appropriations information, program activity and object class, and award financial information for allocation transfers for display on USASpending.gov.”

As for buy/sell transactions, both the awarding and funding agencies must submit information for spending reports.

Under the new guidance, if a Federal Award Identification Number (FAIN) is included in details for a single award, the agency should report that award to USASpending “as a single, discrete record.”

If single award-level reporting isn’t possible, agencies can report aggregated awards at a county or state level.

As of the Nov. 6 guidance, however, the DAIMS [DATA Act Information Model Schema] only offers guidance for aggregate county level.

OMB directs agencies to continue the county-level reporting practice until that schema is modified.

The guidance is the latest in a  series of OPM memos and updates for agencies, as they prepare for the May 2017 implementation of the DATA Act.

Officials with OMB and Treasury — the two agencies spearheading the DATA Act’s implementation — stand by the progress toward full adoption, while GAO auditors have repeatedly warned that the federal spending standardization could fall behind if agencies don’t get in line with the legislation’s requirements.

In early August, a GAO report warned that Treasury’s 4-month delay for releasing its schema version 1.0, triggered the delay of industry software patches while companies waited for a “stable version of the schema.”

That assessment came on the heels of another GAO report that said the full rollout of the DATA Act is at risk if OMB and Treasury don’t take steps to improve the review of agency plans and monitoring of progress updates.

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DATA Act Resources

Information regarding the requirements for implementation of the DATA Act can be found at the following websites:

–OMB Memo 15-12: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/2015/m-15-12.pdf.

–OMB MPM Memo 2016-03: https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/financial/memos/management-procedures-memorandum-no-2016-03-additional-guidance-for-data-act-implementation.pdf

–DATA Act Data Elements guidance: https://community.max.gov/pages/viewpage.action?spaceKey=Management&title=B%3A+DATA+Act+Elements+Guidance.

–DATA Act GitHub site: https://fedspendingtransparency.github.io/.

–DATA Act Policy FAQs: https://community.max.gov/display/Management/DATA+Act+Implementation+Other+Resources.

–RSS: https://community.max.gov/x/CIbyL

Agencies Looking for Internal Data Turn to USASpending.gov

It’s surprising how many agencies now use USASpending.gov to “access their own data,” said David Lebryk, the fiscal assistant Treasury secretary who on Monday delivered an upbeat assessment of governmentwide progress in implementing the 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act.

“We’re off to a great start on tough challenges, but outsiders don’t really appreciate how complex government is,” he said at a breakfast sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University Government Analytics program and REI Systems.

“We’re not a small business,” Lebryk said, referring to the federal government. “We’re the biggest entity in the world. And at a time of budget constraints, there is more scrutiny of spending, of which the DATA Act is a part.”

Lebryk and Comptroller David Mader are leading the team charged with implementing the DATA Act, which is designed to standardize spending information in machine-readable formats to make it accessible to the public. “With no new funding,” Lebryk said, “we’ve tried to think it through creatively, to use technology as our friend. We’re not doing massive system changes, and it’s important that the data be owned by the agencies.”

This spring’s upgrade of USASpending.gov—to which some transparency advocates objected—was done with an eye on three types of users, Lebryk said: casual users in the general public; those who want analytic tools to drill deeply; and those who simply want the data and don’t care about the tools. The recent upgrade was intended to enhance the second group, he said. “We were trying for improvements in usability, but not trying to improve the quality of the data,” which is where the DATA Act will come in, he said.

One of Lebryk’s teammates at the Office of Management and Budget gave additional details on progress at the June 10 Data Act Summit sponsored by the Data Transparency Coalition.

Karen Lee, branch chief at OMB’s Office of Federal Financial Management, said the DATA Act already is, “changing the way government does its work, changing the way it interacts with non-federal partners” as it becomes institutionalized. She described pilot programs to reduce the burden of agency reporting. “There’s no one regulation or policy that is a magic bullet, as there are many sources for the burden,” Lee said. But the multi-agency implementation team is seeking to curb multiple requirements for supplying the same information, she said.
-Charles S. Clark, GovExec.com
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