AGC Will Monitor Implementation to Protect Contractors from Baseless Fraud Claims
On June 13, Vice President Joe Biden announced the launch of a government wide "Campaign to Cut Government Waste."
The plan, detailed in an
Executive Order signed by President Obama on June 13, describes the campaigns two key initiatives:
- The creation of a new Oversight and Accountability Board; and
- Regular Cabinet meetings to report progress to the Vice President
Building on the execution of the Recovery Act, Biden announced the establishment of a new oversight and accountability board to help federal agencies improve their performance and reduce waste, fraud and abuse across government. The head of the new board will be former Interior Department Inspector General Earl Devaney, who has been heading the recovery board since passage of the Recovery Act.
The mission of the new Board is to allow taxpayers the same ability to track where dollars are going and to track spending beyond Recovery Act dollars. The Board will be composed of eleven members, including agency Inspector Generals, Chief Financial Officers or Deputy Secretaries, an official from the Office of Management & Budget, and other such members President Obama may designate. The new Board will work closely with Chairman Devaney and the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to expand the benefits of this new, more effective way of doing business.
The Executive Order also strengthens accountability, directing Cabinet members to report progress cutting waste and delivering results directly to Biden. He will hold regular meetings with Cabinet members and requires agency Chief Operating Officers, generally Deputy Secretaries, and Chief Financial Officers to report progress regularly to the Office of Management and Budget. As one of the campaign’s first steps, the Administration will target duplication and waste among federal websites. There are almost 2,000 separate websites across the federal government. Accordingly, the Administration will immediately put a halt to the creation of new websites and shutdown or consolidate 25 percent of the 2,000 sites over the next few months and set a goal of cutting the number of separate, stand alone sites in half over the next year.
Also on June 13, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) introduced
legislation to create a similar oversight board. The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, or DATA Act, would establish an independent body to track federal spending, including grants, contracts, loans and agencies' internal expenses, on a single electronic platform, using consistent reporting standards and data identifiers, and making all of the information available to the public. The DATA Act makes several major pro-transparency reforms, including:
- Establishing a universal standard of recipient reporting for money received from the federal government directly to an independent database. This has widely been credited as the key to the success of the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board in catching and preventing fraud, waste, and abuse in stimulus spending.
- Collecting all agency expenditure data and combining it with the recipient reported data. This will allow agencies, Congress, and citizen watchdogs to discover waste and inefficiency in government and expose systematic financial management problems that lead to improper payments.
- Creating a permanent successor to the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, the body established by the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act to ensure transparency, and giving that board similar powers to ensure all federal spending is transparent to the public. The new board is designated as the Federal Accountability and Spending Transparency Board (FAST Board).
- Directing the new FAST Board to establish common identifiers and consistent reporting standards for all federally collected data.
The FAST Board will be tasked solely with receiving, organizing and publishing federal spending information. Chairman Issa first met with Biden in November of last year to discuss spending transparency and using the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board as a model for building a transparent and accountable government. Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board Chairman Earl Devaney will testify at an Oversight Committee hearing on federal spending transparency and the solutions that the bill proposes on Tuesday.
The text of the legislation can be viewed
here.
A section by section summary of the legislation can be viewed
here.
AGC is working with Congressional Oversight leaders and the Federal Agencies as plans for implementation of these transparency efforts progress.
For more information, please contact Marco Giamberardino at (703) 837-5325 or giamberm@agc.org.
