An agency summary issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "Closeout is an important final point of grants accountability. It helps to ensure that grantees have met all financial and reporting requirements. It also allows federal agencies to identify and redirect unused funds to other projects and priorities as authorized or to return unspent balances to the Department of the Treasury (Treasury). At the end of fiscal year 2011, GAO identified more than $794 million in funding remaining in expired grant accounts (accounts that were more than 3 months past the grant end date and had no activity for 9 months or more) in the Payment Management System (PMS). GAO found that undisbursed balances remained in some grant accounts several years past their expiration date: $110.9 million in undisbursed funding remained unspent more than 5 years past the grant end date, including $9.5 million that remained unspent for 10 years or more. Nevertheless, the more than $794 million in undisbursed balances remaining in PMS represents an improvement in closing out expired grant accounts with undisbursed balances in PMS compared to the approximately $1 billion GAO found in 2008. This improvement is notable given that the overall …

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

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "From fiscal year 2007 through fiscal year 2010, DOD activities for the treatment and research of PH and TBI received more than $2.7 billion. In fiscal year 2007, funding for these activities totaled $900 million; in fiscal year 2008, it was $573.8 million; in fiscal year 2009, $395 million; and in fiscal year 2010, $838.6 million. GAO found, however, that the reports DOD provided to Congress on these activities did not include expenditures, as required by law, and that the obligations data they contained were unreliable. Governmentwide policies call for agencies to have effective internal controls to assure accurate reporting of obligations and expenditures. However, the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs has not developed quality control mechanisms to help ensure that data on PH and TBI activities are complete and accurate. Further, although DOD listed patient care among reported costs, it did not specify what those costs included, making it difficult for decisionmakers and Congress to fully understand the costs."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), employs a risk-based approach that uses the Automated Targeting System (ATS) and other tools to identify (target) maritime cargo shipments for further examination. ATS is a web-based enforcement and decision support system that includes a set of rules to assess the risk level for each arriving cargo shipment. This set of rules is referred to as the maritime national security weight set (weight set) because each rule in the set has a specific weighted value assigned to it. CBP classifies the risk scores from the weight set as low, medium, or high risk. CBP policy states that a shipment's risk score is to determine, in part, actions taken by CBP officers (targeters) at the ports. Specifically, targeters are generally required to review shipment data for all medium-risk and high-risk shipments and hold high-risk shipments for examination. The risk score, however, is not the sole factor that determines whether a targeter reviews the data for a shipment or whether CBP examines a shipment. In particular, targeters at each of the six ports GAO visited …

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is developing a resilience policy, but an implementation strategy is a key next step that could help strengthen DHS resilience efforts. DHS defines resilience as the ability to resist, absorb, recover from, or adapt to adversity, and some high-level documents currently promote resilience as a key national goal. Specifically, two key White House documents emphasize resilience on a national level--the 2011 Presidential Policy Directive 8 and the 2012 National Strategy for Global Supply Chain Security. Since 2009, DHS has emphasized the concept of resilience and is currently in the process of developing a resilience policy, the initial steps of which have included creating two internal entities--the Resilience Integration Team and the Office of Resilience Policy (ORP). According to ORP officials, they saw a need to establish a policy that provides component agencies with a single, consistent, departmentwide understanding of resilience that clarifies and consolidates resilience concepts from high-level guiding documents, and helps components understand how their activities address DHS's proposed resilience objectives. ORP officials hope to have an approved policy in place later this year. However, DHS officials stated that …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) uses data reactively and proactively to prevent accidents and manage safety risks. For instance, since 1998, FAA has partnered with the airline industry to identify precursors and contributing factors, and ensure that efforts to improve safety focus on the most prevalent categories of accidents and formulate an intervention strategy designed to reduce recurrences. Although FAA plans to continue using data reactively to understand the causes of accidents and incidents, as part of its adoption of Safety Management Systems (SMS), it is shifting to a proactive approach in which it analyzes data to identify and mitigate risks before they result in accidents."

A letter report issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has defined a vision for its new information technology (IT) governance process, which includes a tiered oversight structure that defines distinct roles and responsibilities throughout the department. The new governance framework and the associated policies and procedures are generally consistent with recent Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidance and with best practices for managing projects and portfolios identified in GAO’s IT Investment Management framework, with two practices partially addressed and seven others fully addressed. For example, consistent with OMB guidance calling for the Chief Information Officer (CIO) to play a significant role in overseeing programs, DHS’s draft procedures require that lower-level boards overseeing IT programs include the DHS CIO, a component CIO, or a designated executive representative from a CIO office. In addition, consistent with practices identified in GAO’s IT Investment Management framework, DHS’s draft procedures identify key performance indicators for gauging portfolio performance. However, DHS’s policies and procedures have not yet been finalized, because, according to officials, the focus has been on piloting the new governance process. While it is important to conduct pilots to test processes and …