The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report today tracking progress of the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on developing an e-commerce program that Federal agencies can use to purchase commercial products through portals that the program will create. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report today that calls for the Department of Defense (DoD) to use a central location to catalog the data it generates from its use of satellites – a move that GAO said could reduce the billions of dollars that DoD spends on satellite development by instead hosting more payloads on commercial satellites. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report today finding that three-quarters of major Federal agencies maintain incomplete, untimely, inaccurate, or poor-quality spending data, and that around half of them are not even implementing required data standards in the first place. […]

After 16 years at the Government Accountability Office, Dave Powner, the high priest of government IT accountability is stepping away from the alter.  […]

The Government Accountability Office on Thursday released the findings of a review of the Internal Revenue Service’s major IT investments, citing well-known shortcomings in the tax collection agency’s aging technology infrastructure and recommending steps to make better use of the billions IRS spends on IT each year. […]

With the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) formally signing on last month to adopt the same electronic health records system as the Department of Defense (DoD), the two agencies are putting a lot of chips on a solution to a problem that history suggests is pretty risky. […]

The Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), passed by Congress in December 2014, represented the first major legislative overhaul of Federal IT in nearly 20 years. Beginning in November 2015, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released two scorecards a year grading agencies’ performance under the law. Suffice to say, agencies haven’t always been making the GAO’s Honor Roll, with plenty of Cs and Ds to go around. However, many agencies have made significant improvements over the last 3 years. […]

The House Oversight and Government Reform (OGR) IT subcommittee followed up last week’s release of the sixth FITARA Scorecard (Scorecard 6.0) by releasing a second, more detailed scorecard. It provides insight into each of the categories of FITARA scoring, with methodology, metrics, calculations, and detailed data points on just how well each of the 24 agencies fared.  […]

Federal agencies might not meet the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) data center closure goals, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. Based on current projections, only 7,221 of the 12,062 data centers that agencies reported in August 2017 will be closed by September of this year. […]

Federal government officials and a member of Congress influential in government IT spending debates said late last month that billions of additional savings look to be ripe for the picking through elimination of duplicative services, and that Congress is working on ways to beef up the pursuit of those savings. […]

Critical infrastructure protection is so vital to the United States’ national and economic security, as well as public health and safety, that disruption or destruction of any of the 16 critical sectors would have a debilitating effect on the nation. […]

The Trump administration has a fever for curing Fraud, Waste, and Abuse (FWA)–in fact, this is perhaps the most important Three Letter Acronym in Federal IT today. So, GAO’s January report on the shortcomings of CMS Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System (T-MSIS) and the fact that Medicaid improper payments hit an estimated $36.7 billion in 2017 raised temperatures across government. […]

As you open your fortune cookie–you might ask, will 2018 be the year of widespread deployment of Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tools across Federal data centers? […]

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) need to more fully align its antifraud efforts with the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) Fraud Risk Framework, GAO auditors said in a report released Dec. 5. CMS’s anti-fraud programs currently align only partially with the risk framework, GAO’s investigation revealed. […]

The Government Accountability Office found that 62 percent of major information technology software development investments were certified by the agency chief information officer for using adequate incremental development in fiscal year 2017. However, a number of responses for the remaining investments were incorrectly reported due to agency error. […]

The Government Accountability Office evaluated the advantages and disadvantages of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command’s dual-hat leadership system and found that the system causes tension between the two agencies due to competing interests. […]

A Government Accountability Office study uncovered a huge discrepancy in Federal reporting on sexual violence because the agencies that collect the data don’t record or label incidents the same way. According to data collection efforts from four Federal agencies, between 244,190 and 1,929,000 rapes or sexual assaults occurred in 2011. […]

Over the past 10 years, agencies have made minimal use of their special government employees who do not serve on Federal boards, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. However, the report also states that not all of these SGEs’ assignments have been reliably documented. […]

Commercial data services can help the efficiency of program integrity activities for certain government agencies. The Government Accountability Office stated in a June 30 report that agencies can focus their efforts on other tasks if they allow commercial data service providers to offer Web and phone-based services to authenticate taxpayers’ identities. […]

The 18 government agencies with high-impact systems constantly fend off cyberattacks from “nations,” which are groups of hackers sponsored by nation-states. According to a U.S. Government Accountability Office security report, these attacks pose the most serious threat to the security of these systems. […]