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The Labor, Transportation and Veterans Affairs departments won accolades for the transparency and accountability of their reports on their performance Tuesday, as officials discussed the possibility that such data could be linked more closely with budget submissions in future years.

The three agencies earned top rankings for overall reporting, transparency and leadership on an annual evaluation of agencies' performance and accountability reports conducted by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. The same agencies were among those at the top of the list last year, too.

The center judges the agencies' reports on their activities, rather than the activities themselves. It found that the 10 agencies that scored "satisfactory" or better on their fiscal 2006 reports accounted for just 13 percent of federal noninterest spending, down from 15 percent the previous year.

"Federal agencies seem to have a hard time explaining to the American people how their work improves the lives of ordinary citizens," said Maurice McTigue, a Mercatus Center researcher and co-author of the report accompanying the rankings. He laid some of the blame at lawmakers' feet, noting, "There's not enough being done by the legislative branch with regard to authorization, reauthorization, legislation and oversight."

At an event announcing the center's findings, researchers and officials discussed the possibility that the Office of Management and Budget will require additional performance information in the congressional budget justification documents that agencies send to Capitol Hill every year.

Some participants questioned whether the performance information would be removed from the annual reports and moved to the budget documents, to reduce the burden on agencies, which are sometimes asked to provide similar information in slightly different formats for the two processes.

But Robert Shea, OMB's associate deputy director for management, said removing the information from the performance and accountability reports is not under discussion, in part because of statutory requirements that it be publicly available. "If ever OMB were to suggest that [congressional justifications] be the exclusive document for reporting performance information, and those documents were not publicly available, then agencies would be out of compliance with the law," he said.

Just this year, OMB issued guidance stating that budget justifications should be posted on agencies' Web sites; in the past, those documents sometimes were closely held by appropriators.

Jonathan Breul, a senior fellow with the IBM Center for the Business of Government, said performance information could garner more attention in budget documents than in performance reports, thanks to the high visibility of budget issues.

McTigue argued that performance information should not be stripped out of the annual reports, which over the past eight years have evolved as an increasingly transparent, understandable place to find information on agency programs. Co-author Jerry Ellig, also of the Mercatus Center, said as long as the data is not eliminated from the reports, getting lawmakers to pay more attention to performance results would be a plus.

Shea said it ultimately comes down to what information lawmakers want, noting that performance data "will only be useful to the appropriators if the appropriators want it."

He cited the Education Department as ahead of the curve in sharing performance data with the Hill, and noted that some appropriators have passed language requiring other agencies to use Education's format.

He said updated guidance for next year's performance and accountability reports will be issued through OMB's Circular A-11, to be finalized in June.

COMMENTS

• I can produce a glowing report that shows all the agency does is fantastic and well worth the money society coughs up for the actions. However, if the numbers reported cannot withstand an audit by a competent independent auditor - what good are they. Fiction is not the basis for good government or successful government programs. So far DoD has refused to do this but the pressure from the DoD Comptroller office is to get everything reportable and not focus on correctness. Because the DoD is the only major government agency that cannot get an unqualified audit on its financial statements, the pressure is on to get it done and not to get it correct! I have seen other financial reports that have received unqualified audits and they should not have but that is the goal. Thus, with incompetent auditors giving glowing reports on statements that do not produce current liabilities and assets and the people in charge of the statement do not even know the definition of the terms, there is little hope that the "new" consolidated financial statements of the government will be meaningful for anything other than what the politicians want to use it to achieve. Beware of the financial statements of the various government agencies because they are so bad that you cannot compare them with anything you may know! taxpayer Posted April 6, 2007 7:48 AM
• The DLA lab I used to work for received frequent accolades for its work. But, wait a minute. The figures were routinely fudged on the annual report so the lab would actual appear to be worth what it cost. After all, the lab is a DLA showpiece. It was pretty common knowledge in the lab and even by the command at DLA. Figures don't lie. But, the Labor Department can sure figure. Robert M. Posted April 5, 2007 12:12 AM
• In the Mercatus Center's eighth annual evaluation of federal agencies' abilities to report on their own performance, the Office of Personnel Management ranks second to last. To a great degree, this is a consequence of OPM's IG refusing to provide oversight of OPM operating programs or management for nearly seventeen years. Peculiarly enough, OPM recently released agency rankings from a federal workforce survey gauging employee perceptions of their jobs and of management and then announced it would help agencies formulate plans to improve their own performance in "human capital management". This is a case of the blind leading the nearsighted. Kenneth D. Huffman Posted April 4, 2007 3:04 AM