On June 15, Government Executive is featuring the government's chief officers of acquisition, finance, human capital, information and information security in a special issue of the magazine. This year we've identified individuals to highlight as Chiefs of the Year -- not necessarily because they are unsurpassed in their fields, but because their peers have much to learn from their experiences.
Chris Flynn
Mark Easton
Deputy Chief Financial Officer
Defense Department
One of the slides in a briefing Mark Easton sometimes presents to colleagues at meetings is titled "The Quest." It's a reference to that stamp of approval all financial managers seek-the clean audit opinion. But at the Defense Department, where Easton serves as the deputy chief financial officer, a clean audit holds all the mystery and elusiveness of a mythological quest, attainable only in a financial manager's dreams.
Easton is under no illusions that Defense is going to win top honors for bookkeeping anytime soon. But for the first time since the 1990 Chief Financial Officers Act was passed requiring agencies to submit their consolidated financial statements to independent auditors for review, achieving an audit doesn't seem entirely far-fetched either.
Under Defense Comptroller Robert F. Hale's leadership, Defense organizations are redirecting their focus away from stove-piped finance and accounting systems toward end-to-end business processes that cross multiple disciplines. The top priority is to achieve successful audits of every organization's Statements of Budgetary Resources. Once that is accomplished, organizations will focus on documenting mission-critical assets. The idea is that by focusing on information people use, Defense can galvanize managers outside the finance and accounting spheres and lay the groundwork for the broader business management reforms that must precede financial reform.
"We've approached this in the past too much from the financial side. We've made some progress, but it hasn't gone to the heart of the challenge with the larger organizations," says Easton, who is leading the departmentwide effort.
GAO has endorsed the plan, which involves the chief management officers at all levels of the department.
"Obviously, budgetary information we use every day. And in focusing on property, we're most interested in where the materiel is, how much do we have, and what condition is it in. Information on property is critical to doing the job, particularly from a warfighter perspective," Easton says.
The new approach will improve the department's business operations along with the quality and integrity of information, and ultimately it will allow the department to be audited across the enterprise, he says.
"We want to maintain the ground we've taken and sustain that moving forward," says Easton, sounding more like an infantryman than the career Navy logistician he was before retiring as a captain after 29 years of service and moving into financial management 15 years ago.
"I spent 20-some years in logistics and when I was doing that my job was to get the part, get the ship under way, get the aircraft in the air or get the submarine under way and [the attitude was] we'd take care of the paperwork later. This is my penance," he says.
"Before I leave [this job] I have to see things change. This is the right recipe for success," says Easton.