Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The threats to systems supporting critical infrastructures are evolving and growing. In testimony, the Director of National Intelligence noted a dramatic increase in cyber activity targeting U.S. computers and systems, including a more than tripling of the volume of malicious software. Varying types of threats from numerous sources can adversely affect computers, software, networks, organizations, entire industries, and the Internet itself. These include both unintentional and intentional threats, and may come in the form of targeted or untargeted attacks from criminal groups, hackers, disgruntled employees, nations, or terrorists. The interconnectivity between information systems, the Internet, and other infrastructures can amplify the impact of these threats, potentially affecting the operations of critical infrastructures, the security of sensitive information, and the flow of commerce. Moreover, the electricity grid’s reliance on IT systems and networks exposes it to potential and known cybersecurity vulnerabilities, which could be exploited by attackers. The potential impact of such attacks has been illustrated by a number of recently reported incidents and can include fraudulent activities, damage to electricity control systems, power outages, and failures in safety equipment."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), as amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (HCERA), contained provisions to increase access to health insurance coverage through: health insurance market reforms; an expansion of Medicaid eligibility; and the creation of health insurance exchanges to provide small employers and individuals access to coverage. In addition, PPACA contained provisions designed to improve the quality of health care, reduce expenditures, and provide incentives for preventive and primary care. To help implement PPACA, federal departments and agencies awarded contracts, including contracts for consulting services. Contractors and consultants perform a variety of tasks, including research, market reviews, actuarial support, logistics and technical support, data management, and information technology support. As required by the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act, 2011, this report provides information on contracts awarded by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and other federal departments and agencies related to authority provided by PPACA, including information on firms retained to facilitate contracting and consultants retained by HHS and other federal departments and agencies to assist in PPACA implementation."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In July 2013, GAO reported that TSA investigated and adjudicated approximately 9,600 cases of employee misconduct from fiscal years 2010 through 2012, according to TSA employee misconduct data that we analyzed. Two offense categories accounted for about half of all cases--(1) attendance and leave, which accounted for 32 percent; and (2) screening and security, which accounted for 20 percent. Charges for screening and security-related incidents pertain to violating standard operating procedures, including not conducting security or equipment checks, and allowing patrons or baggage to bypass screening. TSA developed a Table of Offenses and Penalties that delineates common employee charges, along with a suggested range of penalties. Of the cases that we analyzed, 47 percent resulted in letters of reprimand, which describe unacceptable conduct that is the basis for a disciplinary action; 31 percent resulted in suspensions of a definite duration; and 17 percent resulted in the employee's removal from TSA. The remaining cases covered a variety of outcomes, including suspensions of an indefinite duration."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Over the last decade, working women’s access to and participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans have improved relative to men. In fact, from 1998 to 2009, women surpassed men in their likelihood of working for an employer that offered a pension plan—largely because the proportion of men covered by a plan declined. Furthermore, as employers have continued to terminate their defined benefit plans and switch to defined contribution plans, the proportion of women who worked for employers that offered a defined contribution plan increased. Women’s higher rates of pension coverage may be due to the fact that they are more likely to work in the public and nonprofit sectors and industries that offer coverage, such as health and education."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Prior Department of Defense (DOD) civilian workforce downsizing efforts in the 1990s were not oriented toward shaping the makeup of the workforce, resulting in significant imbalances in terms of shape, skills, and retirement eligibility. Specifically, in a series of reviews GAO found that DOD’s efforts in the 1990s to reduce its federal civilian workforce to levels below that of 1987 were hampered by incomplete data and lack of a clear strategy for avoiding skill imbalances and other adverse effects of downsizing. For instance, in 1992, GAO found that DOD used incomplete and inconsistent data related to workers, workload, and projected force reductions. Further, the approaches DOD has relied on to accomplish downsizing have sometimes had unintended consequences. The use of voluntary attrition, hiring freezes, and financial separation incentives allowed DOD to mitigate some adverse effects of civilian workforce reductions, but were less oriented toward shaping the makeup of the workforce than was the approach the department used to manage its military downsizing. For DOD, this was especially true of the civilian acquisition workforce. The department, which in 2011 obligated about $375 billion to acquire goods and services, was …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In summary, 761 hospitals and 56,585 professionals were awarded a total of approximately $2.3 billion in Medicare EHR incentive payments for 2011. These 761 hospitals represented 16 percent of the estimated 4,855 eligible hospitals, and were awarded $1.3 billion in Medicare EHR incentive payments for 2011. While the amount of EHR incentive payments awarded to each hospital ranged from $22,300 to $4.4 million, the median payment amount was $1.7 million. About 61 percent of hospitals accounted for about 80 percent of the total amount of incentive payments awarded to hospitals. Among hospitals awarded an incentive payment for 2011, we found that"

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO's simulation found that under the current Federal Employees' Compensation Act (FECA) program, the median wage replacement rate--the percentage of take-home pay replaced by FECA--for total-disability beneficiaries was 88 percent for U.S. Postal Service (USPS) beneficiaries and 80 percent for non-USPS beneficiaries in 2010. GAO also found that proposals to set initial FECA benefits at a single compensation rate would reduce these replacement rates by 3 to 4 percentage points under the 70-percent option and 7 to 8 percentage points under the 66-2/3 percent option. Beneficiaries with dependents would receive reduced FECA benefits under both options. The decreases in wage replacement rates were due to the greater proportion of beneficiaries who had a dependent--over 70 percent of both USPS and non-USPS beneficiaries."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In summary, GAO found the following:"

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In April 2010, GAO reported that intellectual property (IP) is an important component of the U.S. economy and IP-related industries contribute a significant percentage to the U.S. gross domestic product. IP-related industries also pay significantly higher wages than other industries and contribute to a higher standard of living in the United States. Ensuring the protection of IP rights encourages the introduction of innovative products and creative works to the public. According to experts and literature GAO reviewed, counterfeiting and piracy have produced a wide range of effects on consumers, industry, government, and the economy as a whole. The U.S. economy as a whole may grow more slowly because of reduced innovation and loss of trade revenue. To the extent that counterfeiting and piracy reduce investments in research and development, companies may hire fewer workers and may contribute less to U.S. economic growth, overall. Furthermore, as GAO reported in June 2012, private sector organizations have experienced data loss or theft, economic loss, computer intrusions, and privacy breaches. For example, in February 2011, media reports stated that computer hackers had broken into and stolen proprietary information worth millions of dollars …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This letter formally transmits the briefing in response to a congressional request on May 4, 2009, that we review the EFV program. We provided congressional staff a draft copy of this briefing in meeting with them on June 9, 2010. We provided the same draft to the Department of Defense (DOD) for comments. A summary of DOD's comments with our evaluation are also attached, as well as a reprinted copy of DOD's written comments."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Army’s requirements for container handling equipment have changed since 1998 from focusing on "break bulk" to focusing on containerized distribution, and the Army has awarded contracts and issued delivery orders to reflect those changing requirements."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) procures most of its goods and services through contracts, and it terminates very few of them. In fiscal year 2010, for example, NASA's procurements, ranging from small contracts for human resources consulting services to multimillion dollar contracts to build and operate spacecraft, totaled approximately $17.4 billion, representing about 83.4 percent of the agency's obligations that year. That same year, it terminated 28 of 16,343 active contracts and orders--a termination rate of about .17 percent. This rate is about the same--less than 0.2 percent--for each of the past 5 fiscal years. NASA contract terminations--the complete or partial cancellation of work under a contract before the contract's period of performance ends--are rare but could become more common in the future. The federal government is facing real fiscal limitations and will have to make difficult choices about upcoming priorities. This reality makes it more important than ever that NASA manage its projects as efficiently and effectively as possible and within its budget. This is a struggle for NASA. Our work has shown that NASA's large-scale projects tend to cost more and take longer to …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Since 2001, strategic human capital management for federal agencies has been on GAO's high-risk list. Although some progress has been made, GAO reported in February 2011 that the area remains on the high-risk list because of the need for agencies, including DOD, to address current and emerging skill gaps that are undermining their ability to fulfill their missions. The Department of Defense (DOD) had about 718,000 civilians as of March 2010, which includes its senior leader and acquisition workforces. DOD has noted that approximately 30 percent of its civilian workforce--and 90 percent of its senior leader workforce--will be eligible to retire by March 31, 2015. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 required (1) DOD to report on plans for its overall civilian, senior leader, and acquisition workforces for 2009 through 2012; (2) DOD to address a series of legislative requirements for each workforce; and (3) GAO to review and report on these plans. DOD has informed GAO that it expects to issue its next set of plans in September 2011. In anticipation of these plans, it is helpful to understand key issues identified during GAO's …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses our work on residential real estate valuations. Real estate valuations, which encompass appraisals and other value estimation methods, play a critical role in mortgage underwriting by providing evidence that the market value of a property is sufficient to help mitigate losses if the borrower is unable to repay the loan. However, recent turmoil in the mortgage market has raised questions about mortgage underwriting practices, including the quality and credibility of some valuations. An investigation into industry appraisal practices by the New York State Attorney General led to an agreement in 2008 between the Attorney General; Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the enterprises); and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which regulates the enterprises. This agreement included the Home Valuation Code of Conduct (HVCC), which set forth certain appraiser independence requirements for loans sold to the enterprises and took effect in 2009. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Pub. L. No. 111-203) (the Dodd-Frank Act) directed us to study the effectiveness and impact of various valuation methods and the options available for selecting appraisers, as well as the impact of HVCC. This testimony …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Social Security Statement (the statement) is the federal government's main document for communicating with more than 150 million workers about their Social Security benefits. Provided annually, it serves as a key financial literacy tool that can educate the public about Social Security Administration (SSA) program benefits, aid in financial planning, and ensure that workers' earnings records are complete and accurate. The statement is also a key tool for communicating with the public about the long-term financial challenges the Social Security system faces. However, due to budget constraints, SSA chose to suspend mailings of the statement in March 2011. GAO examined (1) the current status of the statement and (2) ways SSA plans to improve the usefulness of the statement. To address these issues, GAO interviewed SSA officials and reviewed agency documents and our prior work on the statement's understandability. GAO also provided a draft of this testimony to SSA for review and comment."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "This testimony discusses our past work examining the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) progress and challenges in developing and acquiring new technologies to address homeland security needs. DHS acquisition programs represent hundreds of billions of dollars in life-cycle costs and support a wide range of missions and investments including border surveillance and screening equipment, nuclear detection equipment, and technologies used to screen airline passengers and baggage for explosives, among others. Since its creation in 2003, DHS has spent billions of dollars developing and procuring technologies and other countermeasures to address various threats and to conduct its missions. Within DHS, the Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) conducts general research and development and oversees the testing and evaluation efforts of DHS components, which are responsible for developing, testing, and acquiring their own technologies. This testimony focuses on the findings of our prior work related to DHS's efforts to acquire and deploy new technologies to address homeland security needs. Our past work has identified three key challenges: (1) developing technology program requirements, (2) conducting and completing testing and evaluation of technologies and (3) incorporating information on costs and benefits in making …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The termination of the six defined benefit plans the Delphi Corporation (Delphi) sponsored, and the provision of benefit protections to some Delphi employees but not others, culminated from a complex series of events involving Delphi, the General Motors Corporation (GM), various unions, the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury), and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC). When Delphi spun off from GM in 1999, three unions secured an agreement that GM would provide a retirement benefit supplement (referred to as "top-ups") for their members should their pension plans be frozen or terminated and they were to suffer a resulting loss in pension benefits. These three unions were: (1) the International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW); (2) the International Union of Electronic, Electrical, Salaried, Machine and Furniture Workers, AFL-CIO (IUE); and (3) the United Steelworkers of America (USWA). No other Delphi employees had a similar agreement to receive a top-up, including salaried workers and hourly workers belonging to other unions. Over the course of events that unfolded over the next decade, the agreements with these three unions ultimately were preserved through the resolution …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The November 2011 memorandum that discussed the management of the Chemical Facility Anti-Terrorism Standards (CFATS) program was prepared based primarily on the observations of the Director of the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Infrastructure Compliance Security Division (ISCD), a component of the Office of Infrastructure Protection (IP) within the National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD). The memorandum was intended to highlight various challenges that have hindered ISCD efforts to implement the CFATS program. According to the Director, the challenges facing ISCD included not having a fully developed direction and plan for implementing the program, hiring staff without establishing need, and inconsistent ISCD leadership—factors that the Director believed place the CFATS program at risk. These challenges centered on human capital issues, including problems hiring, training, and managing ISCD staff; mission issues, including overcoming problems reviewing facility plans to mitigate security vulnerabilities and performing compliance inspections; and administrative issues, including concerns about NPPD and IP not supporting ISCD’s management and administrative functions."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In summary, BOP uses different factors in estimating the daily costs of its facilities and community corrections and incorporating certain additional factors would increase the daily cost per inmate for its facilities. Specifically, BOP estimates daily costs per inmate for its prison facilities using operational costs such as staff salaries and training, inmate food, and medical supplies, among other things, but does not include factors such as construction of new prisons, certain modernization and repair (M&R) projects, or depreciation of its existing facilities. According to BOP, these M&R projects and depreciation are incorporated into budget requests, financial statements, and a user fee BOP computes to bill states for the full costs of housing state prisoners. Adding these costs into BOP’s estimates would raise the costs from between $4.39 and $4.82 per day per inmate for the last 3 fiscal years. For community corrections, BOP estimates daily costs using the contract per diem rates paid to the private companies that operate RRCs and monitor inmates on home detention and the costs of management and oversight by BOP Community Corrections officials and subtracts out subsistence fees paid by inmates in …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Over the past 10 years, DHS has made significant progress in deploying radiation detection equipment to scan for nuclear or radiological materials in nearly all trucks and containerized cargo coming into the United Stated through seaports and border crossings. However, challenges remain for the agency in developing a similar scanning capability for railcars entering this country from Canada and Mexico, as well as for international air cargo and international commercial aviation. As portal monitors approach the end of their expected service lives, observations from our past work may help DHS as it considers options to refurbish or replace such monitors. Among other things, we have previously reported that DHS should (1) test new equipment rigorously prior to acquisition and deployment, (2) obtain the full concurrence of the end user to ensure that new equipment meets operational needs, and (3) conduct a cost-benefit analysis to inform any acquisition decisions. In our past work on the GNDA, we recommended that DHS develop an overarching strategic plan to guide the development of the GDNA, as well as a strategic plan for the domestic part of the global nuclear detection strategy. DHS …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "During our audit of the DIF’s 2011 and 2010 financial statements, we identified deficiencies in controls over FDIC’s process for deriving and reporting estimates of losses to the DIF from resolution transactions involving shared loss agreements. While these deficiencies, individually and collectively, did not constitute a material weakness in internal control over financial reporting, they nevertheless increased the risk of additional undetected errors or irregularities in the DIF’s financial statements. Thus, these control deficiencies collectively represented a significant deficiency in FDIC’s internal control over financial reporting for the DIF related to estimating losses from shared loss agreements."

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The federal government has numerous programs designed to improve Americans' financial literacy, some of which are targeted at helping consumers determine whether and when to purchase a home, how to manage a mortgage, and how to deal with setbacks that could limit their ability to make timely mortgage payments. However, as we have reported, little is known about the effectiveness of specific strategies for improving financial literacy. In the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 (HERA), Congress created a pilot program to provide grants to providers of financial education and counseling services to prospective homebuyers. Pursuant to HERA, the goals of this education and counseling include increasing the knowledge and decision-making capabilities of prospective homebuyers, identifying successful methods resulting in positive behavioral change for financial empowerment, and educating prospective homebuyers about options for building savings. HERA also mandated that we submit a report to Congress evaluating this grant program, which was later named the Financial Education and Counseling (FEC) Pilot Program. Accordingly, the objectives of this report are to describe (1) the characteristics of the organizations providing services under the FEC program and how they were selected, …

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins ""

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "GAO was unable to compare ELL enrollment in charter schools to ELL enrollment in traditional public schools because Education's only available data on school-level ELL enrollment were unreliable and incomplete. Specifically, for over one-third of charter schools, the field for reporting the counts of ELLs enrolled in ELL programs was left blank. These blank fields cannot reliably be interpreted to mean that the charter schools did not have ELLs enrolled. Education officials told us that these school-level ELL data do not have a data steward (that is, an office responsible for overseeing the quality of the data) and that the quality of the data is not examined on a regular basis. A definitional issue may have resulted in states excluding some students from the reported counts, and some charter schools may have failed to submit required data to their states. Education officials said they had not systematically studied charter school nonreporting but acknowledged that states sometimes have difficulty obtaining data from charter schools. Some charter schools with blank ELL counts were also missing data from other important datasets, such as those on school performance, which suggests potential broader …