The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is continuing to press the General Services Administration (GSA) for progress on a recommendation that the agency needs to work on ensuring “that street address information in the public database is complete and correctly formatted” for its Federal Property Management area.
According GSA’s latest annual report to the agency on its open priority recommendations to GSA, the recommendation was originally made in 2020 in a report entitled Federal Real Property: GSA Should Improve Accuracy, Completeness, and Usefulness of Public Data.
Some aspects of the recommendation that GSA has already implemented include three different tasks:
- GSA officials revised the data reporting standards to favor longitude and latitude coordinates instead of street addresses;
- GSA published a web-based geospatial validation tool to assist agencies in identifying and correcting erroneous geographic data elements; and
- The agency developed a phased action plan that commits member agencies to accurately report geographic data elements.
“GSA should continue to implement and support the validation tool and the action plan, and we will continue to monitor their effectiveness as results become available in 2022,” GAO said. “An effective validation tool and action plan would improve the accuracy of the street address information in the FRPP database,” it said.
