Treasury's Gregg to retire after 41 years in federal financial management

A long-time stalwart in the federal financial community decided to call it a career after 41 years in government.

The Treasury Department announced May 27 that Fiscal Assistant Secretary Richard Gregg is retiring at the end of June. Treasury said Dave Lebryk, currently the commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service, will take over for Gregg, and Sheryl Morrow, currently deputy assistant secretary for Fiscal Operations and Policy at Treasury, will succeed Lebryk as commissioner. The changes will be official as of June 30.

During his career, Gregg worked under 16 different Treasury secretaries and served for 10 years as the commissioner of the Bureau of the Public Debt.

Most recently, Gregg oversaw efforts to move Treasury into the electronic world. He led initiative for Treasury to stop issuing paper checks in 2013.

Gregg also was a big proponent of shared services for financial management. He played a key role in reinvigorating the program, which recently named new federal providers.

Over the course of the last few years, Lebryk has worked closely with Gregg on many priorities.

Lebryk has been with Treasury for more than 25 years, serving in several senior leadership positions, including the deputy assistant secretary for Fiscal Operations and Policy, and deputy director and acting Director of the Mint.

Morrow, who has more than 34 years with Treasury, will continue to unify the government's fiscal and debt operations under one central vision and leadership under the recently merged Fiscal Service. During her career, she held numerous positions assistant commissioner for payment management and chief disbursing officer at the Financial Management Service.

- Jason Miller, FederalNewsRadio.com
READ MORE...

Lessons from 25 years at the Treasury Department

David A. Lebryk has held numerous positions at the Department of the Treasury since 1989. In 2012, he was named the first commissioner of the Bureau of the Fiscal Service when the Financial Management Service and the Bureau of the Public Debt were consolidated. Lebryk spoke about his experiences at the Treasury with Tom Fox, a guest writer for On Leadership and vice president for leadership and innovation at the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service. Fox also heads up their Center for Government Leadership.

- Tom Fox, WashingtonPost.com
READ MORE...

Department of Defense to Use Invoice Processing Platform (IPP) for Intra-governmental Buy/Sell Transactions

In 2012, Treasury launched a proof-of-concept pilot using IPP to help federal agencies manage intra-governmental buy/sell transactions. Several agencies participated in the pilot, including the Department of Defense (DoD), who found that IPP helped increase visibility into intra-governmental buy/sell transactions, as well as helped with difficult, labor-intensive reconciliation and elimination efforts.

On August 5, 2013, the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) issued a memo that it is partnering with the U.S. Department of the Treasury to implement the Invoice Processing Platform as DoD’s core system to manage all inter- and intra-governmental transactions and documentation. According to the memo, this partnership will strengthen management and accountability for nearly $273 billion in intra-governmental business.

The phased implementation will initially include only DoD-to-DoD transactions. At a later date, transactions between DoD and its civilian trading partners will be included. Excluded from this effort are commercial transactions (which will continue to be managed using DoD’s Wide Area Workflow) and DoD's interfund transactions.

The buy/sell process between government agencies has been fraught with challenges. A 2013 GAO audit of the U.S. Government's Fiscal Years 2012 and 2011 Consolidated Financial Statements (report GAO-13-271R) found a $20.2 billion difference in intra-governmental buy/sell activity and balances. It also revealed that the reconciliation process for buy/sell transactions was difficult and labor intensive.

IPP supports more efficient intra-governmental buy/sell transactions between federal agencies by helping ensure consistent communication between trading partners and providing visibility into each stage of the transaction.

To view the DoD memorandum regarding the implementation of IPP for intra-governmental buy/sell reimbursable transactions, please visit:http://www.ipp.gov/downloads/DoD_Memo.pdf

For more information on the DoD IPP intra-governmental buy/sell implementation, contact the DoD Business Integration Office (BIO)

at (703) 697-1096.

For more information on IPP’s intra-governmental capabilities, contact Michael Bolin at michael.bolin@fms.treas.gov.

For more information about the features and benefits of IPP’s intra-governmental module, visit: http://www.ipp.gov/about-ipp/intra-governmental.

- Federal Reserve Bank of Boston / Treasury FMS
READ MORE...

HUD buying into shared services

W
atch for more action around financial management shared services in the coming months.

Industry sources confirmed the Department of Housing and Urban Development will announce its decision in the coming days to move its core financial management system to the Treasury Department's Bureau of Fiscal Service. BFS, formerly the Bureau of Public Debt, provides shared services to about 40 percent of the civilian agencies, including NASA, the Social Security Administration and components of the Homeland Security Department.

Besides Treasury itself, HUD will be the largest migration to the shared service, and it could take two years, the industry source says.

Additionally, the Interior Department announced earlier this week it awarded Unisys a $44 million contract to put its Financial and Business Management System (FBMS) in the cloud.

And the Federal Trade Commission, the Coast Guard and the Commerce Department are in the discovery phase to decide whether to move to a shared service provider.

But the fact that HUD is making the move to Treasury is a significant milestone. The agency's decision has been a long-time coming. It started the process to implement a new financial management system in 2006 by releasing a request for proposals. It eventually awarded a 10-year contract to IBM in 2010 worth $129 million to implement a new system. It was a three-phased approach starting with HUD's core financial system and then pulling in other components. The project struggled and HUD, with the help of the Office of Management and Budget, revisited its plans that same year.

HUD was one of several agency financial system projects OMB focused on during its 2010 effort to better oversee these programs.

On the IT Dashboard, HUD said it would spend $18 million in 2013 to support its legacy systems, and a total of $26.3 million on its core financial systems.

Over at Interior, Unisys will transition FBMS to a secure, cloud environment that runs SAP's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software platform.

Interior uses FBMS to account for all income and expenditures.

-Jason Miller, FederalNewsRadio.com
READ MORE and LISTEN HERE...

Treasury jobs relocation on hold

The Treasury Department won’t start relocating hundreds of federal employees from Maryland to West Virginia until the end of 2019, according to news releases.

Treasury has put plans on hold to move 450 Financial Management Service employees based in Hyattsville, Md., to Parkersburg, W.Va., giving workers a six-year reprieve. Treasury sought to move the jobs in late 2013 as part of an effort to consolidate the department’s Financial Management Service and the Bureau of Public Debt into the Fiscal Service. Employees initially had until January 2015 to relocate or separate from the government.

The department this week announced the relocation won’t begin until Dec. 31, 2019. Affected jobs include those in accounting, information technology and some management and related support positions.

Maryland’s congressional delegation and the National Treasury Employees Union fought the plan to move employees to another state and negotiated for the delay. 

-Kellie Lunney, GovExec.com
READ MORE...

Treasury's FMS proving shared services works

The Treasury Department's Financial Management Service will have no trouble moving commodity technology to a shared service provider as required by the Office of Management and Budget.


FMS completed its transition to the Bureau of Public Debt for network operations and IT infrastructure support about 18 months ago under its Fiscal IT program. And that was just the latest technology service to be brought under the control of another organization.

"Both BPD and FMS work for the fiscal assistant secretary. In the conversation with him, he asked the question would it be ‘profitable'--save us time, money and energy--to look at combining the two bureau's IT infrastructure?" said John Kopec, the FMS chief information officer. "Both organizations have pretty strong CIO organizations. The BPD organization has a lot of scale in providing shared service infrastructure. Some of our applications prior to consolidation already resided at BPD."


Kopec said after looking at the potential savings and efficiency gains, the decision to move forward was pretty easy.

FMS, meanwhile, provides the oversight and governance, such as project management, capital planning and investment control and security, back to BPD.

-Jason Miller, FederalNewsRadio.com
READ MORE...

Treasury Consolidation Would Merge Debt Division.

The White House on Monday said it wanted to consolidate the Bureau of Public Debt and the Financial Management Service within the Fiscal Service, another Treasury division. They say it will “streamline and modernize operations.”


“The consolidation also strengthens Treasury’s leadership of Federal financial management issues, reduces costs, and enhances efficiencies by further modernizing Federal financial management processes,” the White House said. It’s unclear how much money it will actually save.

-Damian Palleta, WSJ.com
READ MORE...