A congressional investigation has found that many federal agencies will process much of their data by hand. The investigation sent questionnaires to 26 government agencies. Some examples of the practice include the Defense Department manually entering financial reporting data into a Department Of Treasury system and the Department of Interior entering financial reports into a federal accounting system.
The survey, in the form of a letter was sent in March, and included questions on:
1. Agencies’ accounting and financial systems, especially when those systems are different between divisions, bureaus, and offices.
2. Information on proposed modernization plans for IT systems.
3. The IT systems used by the agency to process contracts.
4. Whether or not all the agency’s grants, contracts, and loans are accurate and available on USASpending.gov, the federal website allowing citizens to get information of federal spending.
According to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the survey found that “21 of 26 agencies responding reported the widespread use of manual processes in reporting systems”. The Department of the Interior was particularly bad, using manual processing “in almost every step of its financial reporting”. The Department of Veteran Affairs even has an entire office dedicated to manually transferring information between its different systems. In another case, the Congressional Research Service discovered that millions of Department Of Defense dollars spent in Texas and Maryland were mislabeled as being spent in Turkmenistan and Moldova because the respective locations share the same two-letter codes.
Processing data by hand is both more inefficient and less accurate than automated methods, according to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Kaitlin Lee, senior development at the Sunlight Foundation told Nicole Blake Johnson of the Federal Times that she was unsurprised by the findings and that many government computer systems are “antiquated and fractured”, relying on “manual data entry between systems, which almost always results in errors”. The survey reveals weaknesses in the IT systems of federal agencies, particularly relating to financial information. It is a a sentiment echoed by Rep. Darrel Issa, Chairman of the Oversight Committee, who stated that his survey “shows these systems are not serving taxpayers well”.
Mike Jones is a researcher, writer, and analyst on national and international security. He lives in the DC area.
