Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Defense (DOD) plans to cease commissary operations at Naval Air Station (NAS) Brunswick, Maine because of a 2005 base realignment and closure recommendation to close the installation and transfer the assigned active-duty personnel and equipment to NAS Jacksonville, Florida. DOD plans to close NAS Brunswick and its commissary by September 15, 2011. As of January 2009, NAS Brunswick commissary--located approximately 6 miles northwest of the air station in the town of Topsham--had more than 19,000 authorized patrons. About 10,000 authorized patrons are expected to remain after the installation closes. Representatives from communities surrounding Brunswick and certain elected state officials expressed concern that the commissary's closure will limit shopping options and purchase prices will rise for reservists, military retirees, and dependents and the relatively small number of active-duty personnel remaining in the region after the installation closes. Commissaries are intended to enhance the quality of life of active-duty personnel, military retirees, and their dependents, and support military readiness, recruitment, and retention goals. Commissaries are not expected to be self-supporting, and provide a noncash benefit for active-duty personnel by offering food and related household and health and …

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Whether a utility company that contracts with a county to collect the fees for the county's solid waste disposal service may suspend its own utility service for non-payment of the solid waste disposal fee (RQ-0837-GA).

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Application of Local Government Code section 143.014(c) to municipalities that have adopted chapter 174 of the Local Government Code, the Fire and Police Employee Relations Act; reconsideration of Attorney General Opinion GA-0662(2008)(RQ-0840-GA).

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Authority of a country attorney to issue commissions for reserve or nonpaid peace officers (RQ-0730-GA).

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification; Authority of a water company to paint the fire hydrants black under certain circumstances (RQ-0750

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In the past, governments worldwide owned, operated, and regulated air navigation services, viewing air traffic control as a governmental function. But as nations faced increasing financial strains, many governments decided to shift the responsibility to an independent air navigation service provider (ANSP) that operates along commercial lines. As of March 2005, 38 nations worldwide had commercialized their air navigation services, fundamentally shifting the operational and financial responsibility for providing these services from the national government to an independent commercial authority. GAO selected five ANSPs--in Australia, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom--to examine characteristics and experiences of commercialized air navigation services. These ANSPs used different ownership structures and varied in terms of their size, amount of air traffic handled, and complexity of their airspace. This testimony, which is based on ongoing work, addresses the following questions: (1) What are common characteristics of commercialized ANSPs? (2) What do available data show about how the safety, cost, and efficiency of air navigation services have changed since commercialization? (3) What are some initial observations that can be made about the commercialization of air navigation services?"

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "In 2002, the Coast Guard began a multiyear, $19 billion to $24 billion acquisition program to replace or modernize its fleet of deepwater aircraft and cutters, so called because they are capable of operating many miles off the coast. For several years now, the Coast Guard has been warning that the existing fleet--especially cutters--was failing at an unsustainable rate, and it began studying options for replacing or modernizing the fleet more rapidly. Faster replacement is designed to avoid some of the costs that might be involved in keeping aging assets running for longer periods. This testimony, which is based both on current and past GAO work, addresses several issues related to these considerations: (1) changes in the condition of deepwater legacy assets during fiscal years 2000 through 2004; (2) actions the Coast Guard has taken to maintain and upgrade deepwater legacy assets; and (3) management challenges the Coast Guard faces in acquiring new assets, especially if a more aggressive schedule is adopted."

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plays a key role in coordinating the nation's homeland security efforts with stakeholders in the federal, state, local, and private sectors. While GAO has conducted numerous reviews of specific DHS missions, such as border and transportation security and emergency preparedness, this testimony addresses overall DHS management issues. This testimony addresses (1) why GAO designated DHS's transformation as a high-risk area; and (2) the specific management challenges facing DHS."

Other written product issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "An international peer review team with representatives from the supreme audit institutions of Canada, Australia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden reviewed the quality assurance system that the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO) has established for managing its performance audit practice. The GAO's quality assurance system encompasses its organizational structure and the policies and procedures established to provide it with reasonable assurance of complying with Government Auditing Standards. The GAO is responsible for the design of its quality assurance system and compliance with it, including the quality of its products. The responsibility of the peer review team is to express an opinion on whether the system is suitably designed and operating effectively to meet its objective. The criteria the peer review team used to assess the GAO's quality assurance system were drawn from GAO legislative authorities, Government Auditing Standards, and the GAO performance audit manual. The peer review team conducted the review in accordance with the peer review standards in Government Auditing Standards, and in a manner consistent with the Code of Ethics and auditing standards issued by the International Organization of Supreme …

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The tax-exempt sector under section 501(c) of the Internal Revenue Code covers over a million-and-a-half entities of varying sizes and purposes. Its diversity allows it to address the needs of many citizens. To help it do so, Congress and some in the tax-exempt sector itself encourage good governance practices by exempt entities. Transparency over exempt entities' activities is aided by public access to their annual tax returns. As the nation's tax administrator, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has a key role in overseeing this sector. Oversight can help ensure adherence to exempt purposes, protect against abuses, and sustain public support for the sector. The Chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means asked GAO to address (1) the growth of the section 501(c) tax-exempt sector; (2) the role of governance and transparency in ensuring that tax-exempt entities function effectively and with integrity; (3) IRS's capacity for overseeing the exempt sector, including its results and efforts to address critical compliance problems; and (4) states' oversight and their relationship with IRS in overseeing the tax-exempt sector."

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, Greg Abbott, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether section 6.025(d) of the Tax Code violates article VIII, section 1(a), (b) and 18(c) of the Texas Constitution (RQ-0285-GA)

Testimony issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "The Department of Veterans Affairs' Vocational Rehabilitation and Employment (VR&E) program has taken on heightened importance due, in large measure, to the number of servicemembers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq with serious injuries and their need for vocational rehabilitation and employment assistance. This statement draws on over 20 years of GAO's reporting on VA's provision of vocational rehabilitation and employment assistance to American veterans and focuses primarily on the results of two recent GAO reports. The first, issued in June 2004, commented on the report of the VA-sponsored VR&E Task Force, which performed a comprehensive review of VR&E activities and made extensive recommendations that, if implemented, would affect virtually every aspect of VR&E's operations. The second, issued in January 2005, focused on the steps VA has taken and the challenges it faces in providing services to seriously injured veterans returning from Afghanistan and Iraq."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, established in 1996, is a bilateral and multilateral effort to provide debt relief to poor countries to help them achieve economic growth and debt sustainability. Multilateral creditors are having difficulty financing their share of the initiative, even with assistance from donors. Under the existing initiative, many countries are unlikely to achieve their debt relief targets, primarily because their export earnings are likely to be significantly less than projected by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF). In a recently issued report, GAO assessed (1) the projected multilateral development banks' funding shortfall for the existing initiative and (2) the amount of funding, including development assistance, needed to help countries achieve economic growth and debt relief targets. The Treasury, World Bank, and African Development Bank commented that historical export growth rates are not good predictors of the future because significant structural changes are under way in many countries that could lead to greater growth. We consider these historical rates to be a more realistic gauge of future growth because of these countries' reliance on highly volatile primary commodities and other vulnerabilities such …

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) requires federal agencies to minimize the paperwork burden they impose on the public. The act also requires agencies to obtain approval from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) before collecting covered information. At Congress's request, GAO examined changes during the past fiscal year in federal agencies' paperwork burden estimates and their causes, focusing on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). GAO also examined changes in the number of violations of the PRA."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "On March 4, 2004, GAO testified before the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, House Committee on Financial Services, at a hearing on oversight of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) and discussed the results of our 2003 and 2002 audits of FDIC's financial statements. This letter responds to subsequent questions that the Chairwoman asked GAO to answer for the record."

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Having grown to over $7.5 trillion in assets, mutual funds have become vital components of the financial security of more than 95 million American investors. However, in 2003, various allegations of misconduct and abusive practices involving mutual funds came to light. Therefore, ensuring that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which has primary oversight of the mutual fund industry, has the necessary resources and strategic focus to adequately oversee fund practices has never been more important. To assess how SEC is positioned to oversee mutual funds, GAO reviewed (1) how the abusive mutual fund practices were identified and SEC's subsequent responses, (2) SEC's plans for increasing its staffing in the divisions and offices responsible for overseeing mutual funds and its progress in developing a new strategic plan to guide staff deployment, and (3) the challenges SEC faces in overseeing the mutual fund industry."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "The Haitian Refugee Immigration Fairness Act of 1998 authorizes Haitian nationals and their dependents to apply to adjust their status to legal permanent residence. This report contains a breakdown of the numbers of Haitians who applied and the number who were approved as asylum applicants, parolees, children without parents, orphaned children, or abandoned children, or as the eligible dependents of these applicants. GAO found that as of March 2001, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had received 35,424 applications and had approved 1,454 of them. The Executive Office for Immigration Review had 107 applications filed and had approved 76 of them."

Correspondence issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the District of Columbia (DC) Courts' payment processing procedures for defender services."

This chapter aims to review the magnetic structures observed in the RE{sub 2}Fe{sub 14}B (RE = Nd, Pr) system using various TEM magnetic imaging techniques. The authors focus on studies of die-upset Nd-based permanent magnets conducted mainly at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the past several years. Investigations on Nd-Fe-B sintered magnets and single crystals, as well as Pr-Fe-B die-upset magnets also will be covered. In Sec.2 and Sec.3 they review the microstructure, including grain alignment and secondary phases of the materials, and grain boundary structure and composition of the intergranular phase. Sec.4 is devoted to the domain structure, such as the width of domain and domain wall and domain-wall energy. Monte Carlo simulation of the effects of demagnetization fields will be presented in Sec.5. In-situ experiments on the dynamic behavior of domain reorientation as a function of temperature, pinning, grain boundary nucleation related to coercivity under various fields are described in Sec.6. Finally, in Sec.7 the correlation between microstructure and properties are discussed.

This document explains how to use plotStuff, a program for plotting results from Overture programs. plotStuff reads data-base files created by Overture that contain information about the grid and solutions, a ''show file''. plotStuff has features for plotting contours, cutting planes, streamlines, iso-surfaces and grids. It can also be used to plot various derived quantities such as derivatives of the solution components. This document describes the class Derived Functions which is used to compute these derived quantities.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a member of the board of managers of a hospital district must abstain in matters involving prevailing wage disputes under chapter 2258 of the Government Code.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Distinction between "the hair" and "the beard" for purposes of the barber statute.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether a home-rule city may expend tax funds to sponsor children's travel on out-of-state appearances.

Document issued by the Office of the Attorney General of Texas in Austin, Texas, providing an interpretation of Texas law. It provides the opinion of the Texas Attorney General, John Cornyn, regarding a legal question submitted for clarification: Whether the "fraudulent filing" provisions of the Business and Commerce Code apply to those transactions excepted under section 9.104 thereof.