The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is working to replace its aging financial management system, but a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reveals that the agency needs to develop more comprehensive risk response plans to help mitigate risks that would affect the system’s integration with other VA IT modernization projects.
The VA’s Financial Management Business Transformation (FMBT) program marks VA’s third attempt to modernize its financial and accounting systems. After a false start in 2016 and 2017, VA relaunched the program in 2018 and has since implemented the new Integrated Financial and Acquisition Management System (iFAMS) at a number of VA offices.
However, in order to ensure the success of the program, GAO said that VA must “ensure that responsible risk owners develop integration risk response plans that contain detailed and specific mitigation actions.”
“While FMBT has taken steps to address identified integration risks, we found that the program has not fully documented its risk response plans,” the report says.
Specifically, GAO found that FBMT’s risk response plans “did not include specific, detailed actions for 11 of the 13 risks and issues related to iFAMS integration” with the agency’s three other major IT modernization projects.
These programs include the Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM), Supply Chain Modernization (SCM), and Veterans Benefits Management System (VBMS).
FMBT’s targeted completion date is 2030, but GAO said that “this date is questionable” as multiple deployments depend on other currently paused or delayed VA IT modernization efforts, such as EHRM and SCM.
The EHRM program is currently in the middle of a “program reset,” while the VA and contractor Oracle Cerner focus on improvements at the six sites where the EHR system is currently deployed. The VA plans to resume deployment activities in fiscal year 2025, but it does not yet have a new schedule.
On the other hand, the SCM program is nearing a contract award after issuing a solicitation for a new supply chain management system in late June 2023. This comes after the VA announced in December 2022 that it was transitioning away from the Defense Medical Logistics Standard Support (DMLSS) system after it failed to meet agency expectations.
GAO made one recommendation for the VA to ensure that “responsible risk owners develop integration risk response plans that contain detailed and specific mitigation actions.” The VA agreed with the recommendation.
