The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is calling on the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) to prioritize better managing of its software license inventories to find ways to cut costs and better inform investment decision-making.
In a new report, GAO provides its annual update on the status of OPM’s implementation of GAO recommendations, including 16 open recommendations that should be given high priority.
As of April 2024, OPM had 78 open recommendations. “Fully implementing these open recommendations could significantly improve both OPM’s operations and its efforts to assist Federal agencies in addressing various human capital management issues,” the GAO report says.
This year, GAO added two new priority recommendations, one of which is related to better-managing software license inventories.
“The director of OPM should ensure that the agency compares the inventories of software licenses that are currently in use with information on purchased licenses to identify opportunities to reduce costs and better inform investment decision making for its widely used licenses on a regular basis,” the report says. “At a minimum, it should consistently implement its procedures for comparing the inventories of licenses in use to purchase records.”
OPM agreed with this recommendation and in March 2024 said its efforts to compare software license inventories were “in progress.”
“To fully implement this recommendation, OPM needs to provide evidence that it has compared its inventory of software licenses with known purchases for its widely used licenses and has a plan to continue this comparison regularly,” GAO said in the report.
GAO explained that the potential financial benefit of this recommendation if implemented is less than $1 million. However, it says “doing so should help identify opportunities to reduce costs on duplicative or unnecessary licenses.”
