Government Executive - Authors - Gadi Dechter

Making IGs Part of the Solution

Gadi Dechter — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 02:00:00 -0500

The internal government watchdogs known as inspectors general spend their days examining the federal bureaucracy for crooked contractors, wasteful spending and $16 muffins.

With an army of 12,000 workers and an aggregate budget of around $2 billion, their feared audits and investigations annually identify tens of billions of dollars in questionable costs and lead to thousands of successful criminal prosecutions, indictments, contractor debarments and firings.

Which makes the several dozen presidentially appointed inspectors general uniquely qualified to champion all that’s innovative, effective and excellent in the federal government. Congress should demand they do just that.

This counterintuitive idea, which has been making the rounds in the Obama administration, is not as crazy as it sounds. After all, the people who work for inspectors general are experts in accounting, procurement and the arcane operations embedded deep in every agency. They’re politically independent, so even the media trust them to tell the truth.

If inspectors general devoted even a small fraction of their energies to identifying and exposing what works in government -- in addition to what’s rotten -- they could help Congress and the White House figure out how to best keep critical government services running as well as possible in an era of massive budget cuts.

“IGs should be identifying what works already,” says Daniel Feldman, a John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor who researches government oversight. “Part of their mission is to advance efficiency and economy in government.

You wouldn’t know that by looking at their typical work product. Of the more than five dozen semiannual reports to Congress delivered last spring from inspector general offices, only a handful spilled any ink on which programs get an unusually high return on taxpayer investment, or which management techniques effectively slashed costs without sacrificing services.

A review by the Center for American Progress found that only four of more than 60 IGs highlighted for lawmakers best practices or innovative practices in agencies. The sprinkling of good news that was reported was often buried and didn’t attempt to explore whether pockets of effectiveness could be scaled up or replicated across the agency -- or throughout the government.

“We’ve got a bias in the system to the negative,” says Shelley Metzenbaum, the Office of Management and Budget’s official in charge of federal performance and personnel management.

To be sure, a healthy dose of negative bias is appropriate when safeguarding the public interest. After all, catching a single crook on the public payroll is arguably more important than pointing out the good offices of even 1,000 law-abiding public servants.

But when independent watchdogs neglect to highlight money-saving solutions they encounter on their watch, they rob the public of reliable information that could be used to expand such programs. And a relentless focus on the negative contributes to the widely held view that government is inherently untrustworthy, which helps anti-government ideologues who would starve government of resources the public actually needs and wants.

“The policy problem is getting more oversight officials to pay attention to what government does that works,” says Metzenbaum, who has begun to reach out to inspectors general to explore if this idea might work. “Spreading what works across government boosts the public's return on investment. It enables us to deliver more mission for the taxpayer's money.”

It won’t be an easy sell, even among good-government advocates. “While I love the concept of pointing out things that work, I would argue against the IGs doing it,” says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group. “IGs already are stretched for resources to tackle the challenges . . . and the agency already has a press office that can brag about what works.”

The problem with the press office, of course, is that people distrust it, particularly the press. Inspectors general, on the other hand, operate largely independent of political leadership and so are perceived as credible. And the rare occasions when IGs do highlight what’s working in government shows the potential of having a trusted independent entity look for solutions, not just scandals.

For example, the Commerce Department inspector general’s office confirmed in 2012 that letting patent office workers examine patent applications from home resulted in their processing more fee-generating applications -- while saving taxpayers millions on real estate costs. The State Department’s inspector general office, which is unusual for routinely searching out innovative practices within the department, recently reported on a variety of time- and cost-saving operational techniques being deployed in farflung consular offices that could be replicated around the world.

Eleanor Hill, a former Defense Department inspector general, says most inspector general offices probably encounter similar effective government initiatives during the course of routine audits and inspections. So why don’t they point them out? “No one requires them to do that on a regular basis,” she says.

There’s a simple fix for that and it needn’t detract from inspectors general’s core mission of rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. Congress should simply amend the 1978 Inspector General Act to also ask agency IGs to include in their semiannual reports examples of particularly effective, innovative or cost-saving initiatives that are worth noting.

State’s inspector general already has developed a good definition of an “innovative practice,” which other IGs could adopt: It must be proved, with hard data, to work; it must be new or innovative; and it must be replicable across an agency or throughout the government.

To address concerns such as those raised by POGO’s Brian, Congress could direct inspectors general to spend no more than 5 percent of their resources on identifying and validating effective practices within agencies. (Of course, any increased funding for inspectors general would probably pay for itself.)

That’s all lawmakers have to do. Once Congress starts asking watchdogs to be on the lookout for things that work, the burden will shift to the White House and agencies to make good use of that information.

At a time when we’re demanding the federal government to do more with less, isn’t it important to know what should be expanded -- not just what should be slashed?

Gadi Dechter is the managing director of economic policy at the Center for American Progress.

(Image via andrea michele piacquadio/Shutterstock.com)

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Information Overload

Gadi Dechter — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The conventional standard for judging whether government is "open" is the quantity and type of information it makes available to the public. Likewise, laws that require companies to share information with investors or consumers tend to measure compliance by whether mandatory disclosures are made.

And yet any casual reader of a Federal Register notice or corporate filing knows that ineffective disclosures can undermine the civic and protective aims of a responsible government. Too much information is overwhelming. Poorly presented information creates confusion. Gratuitous complexity sows distrust.

The dangers of information overload are only bound to increase in an age when technology enables the automatic production and release of ever more massive quantities of data. We need a better standard for determining whether the government and the markets it regulates are fulfilling their obligations to communicate openly with the public.

That's why in addition to measuring openness by outputs (how much and which information is disclosed), policymakers and regulators should begin measuring transparency by outcomes: whether the information is comprehensible and useful. A "comprehensibility standard" could be applied in almost any context where the government publishes or regulates information, from the federal rule- making process to student loan servicing to consumer contracts.

Progress and Promise

There are promising moves in this direction. President Obama's regulatory czar, Cass Sunstein, directed agencies in 2010 to mandate simple disclosures that "avoid undue detail or excessive complexity," and to present information to users "when they need it," not when it's convenient for bureaucracy or industry. The 2010 Plain Writing Act, which takes full effect in October, requires communication to be "clear, concise, well-organized" and presented in a way "that the public can understand and use."

Some agencies are taking the lead in testing outcomes. The new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is subjecting revamped mortgage disclosures to consumer testing before beginning the formal rule-making process. "We think the CFPB is on the right track in terms of building in that consumer testing on the front end to make sure they convey the desired information," says Barbara Roper, director of investor protection with the Consumer Federation of America.

Likewise, a radical simplification of the Internal Revenue Service's automated taxpayer correspondence system, informed by user testing, promises to speed dispute resolution and reduce calls to customer service lines. And the Education Department's financial aid division has created a chief customer experience officer to "simplify and improve" college loan applications and to provide a "simpler, more straightforward experience" for borrowers.

Simple Is Not Easy

Making things simple is not simple, however. Consider the new "plain English" disclosures the Securities and Exchange Commission now requires of money managers. Thanks to a new rule, the revamped brochures are available to the public in one searchable database.

They represent one of the most important investor protection initiatives in decades, according to SEC Commissioner Elisse B. Walter. Indeed, they are a major step forward by the federal government in helping investors make informed choices about perhaps the single most important financial decision they make: Whom to entrust with their money.

Unfortunately, the new Form ADV Part II disclosures are also an abject lesson in missed opportunity. They're still too hard to understand, cumbersome to navigate, and likely will continue to be ignored by the very people they're intended to help-unless the SEC releases the data in a more user-friendly way.

In a new paper out in October, "When When Words Get in the Way," the Center for American Progress urges SEC to apply outcome tests to these and other government disclosure regimes.

The commission should use its newfound authority under the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform law to test investors and determine whether the new disclosures are comprehensible or useful-and improve them accordingly. And it should vigorously enforce its plain English requirement, penalizing money managers who fail to explain their business practices and conflicts of interest in a way that the average investor can understand.

"The name of the game, as we all know with regulation, is enforcement," says William Lutz, a retired English professor who led a yearlong SEC disclosure initiative during the Bush administration. "If people never got pulled over for running red lights, how many people would stop for them? Go to Paris and you'll find out."

The Aunt Edna Test

For markets to function well, all participants must have access to useful and understandable information. Sometimes good disclosure means more information. Sometimes it means less. The only way to know for certain whether and when a document is effective is to test it on its intended audience.

Or you could ask Aunt Edna. That's what former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt, who presided over a plain English initiative at the commission, does when trying to figure out whether a piece of communication is comprehensible.

"I just think of my Aunt Edna," he says. "Can Aunt Edna understand it? If she can't, you've got to rewrite it. That's a reasonably good test."

Gadi Dechter is associate director of government reform at the Center for American Progress.

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Information Overload

Gadi Dechter — Sat, 01 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Is open government really working? Ask Aunt Edna.

And yet any casual reader of a Federal Register notice or corporate filing knows that ineffective disclosures can undermine the civic and protective aims of a responsible government. Too much information is overwhelming. Poorly presented information creates confusion. Gratuitous complexity sows distrust.

Progress and Promise

Simple Is Not Easy

In a new paper out in October, "When When Words Get in the Way," the Center for American Progress urges SEC to apply outcome tests to these and other government disclosure regimes.

The Aunt Edna Test

"I just think of my Aunt Edna," he says. "Can Aunt Edna understand it? If she can't, you've got to rewrite it. That's a reasonably good test."

Gadi Dechter is associate director of government reform at the Center for American Progress.

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Making It Plain

Gadi Dechter — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Agencies could take their cue from the IRS' project to clean up legalese in taxpayer letters.

Here's a funny story relayed by Internal Revenue Service call center agents: Taxpayers sometimes call in to complain they have mistakenly received letters intended for someone named "Levy."

The anecdote loses its humor when you consider that a "notice to levy" is an official warning that the government may garnishee your wages or seize your bank assets. Even less funny: A full quarter of the people who received IRS letters in 2007 demanding proof of eligibility for a low-income tax credit didn't realize they were being audited. "It's really astonishing," says Nina Olson, the IRS' national taxpayer advocate. "It just shows the real impact of poor communication."

The good news is stories like these have prompted the tax agency to radically overhaul its automated correspondence system, which every year sends more than 200 million notices to taxpayers. The idea is that simplified, user-friendly letters written in plain English will speed the resolution of disputes and reduce the need for taxpayers to call in for clarification. Officials elsewhere in government would be wise to pay attention. The IRS simplification project is a good case study for the "plain writing" transformation all agencies will be required to implement this year under the little-known 2010 Plain Writing Act.

Communicating effectively means refocusing operations to consider the needs of the reader, not the bureaucracy. It means thinking about how information is designed and processed, as well as how it's written. It requires comprehension testing to ensure reforms are working-and committed leadership from senior officials.

Letter of the Law

Under the bill signed by President Obama late last year, every federal agency by October 2011 must communicate to the public in "clear, concise, well-organized" language. The law does not cover regulations, but it does apply to all other documents that describe government requirements or services-such as tax forms, letters, benefits applications, and Medicare and Social Security handbooks.

At a time when most federal agencies face budget cuts, the White House is emphasizing the potential cost savings from translating legalese to lucid prose. There's hard evidence that clear communications can improve compliance with rules and reduce errors, thereby lowering enforcement and administrative costs, said Cass Sunstein, the administration's regulatory chief, in a guidance memo to agency heads.

And there's an ethical imperative, too.

"You can't really have a democracy if the public doesn't understand what the government is doing," says Annetta Cheek, a retired Interior Department regulations writer who co-founded a group of federal employees evangelizing plain language since the mid-1990s. "Transparency fails if information is out there but no one understands it."

IRS Redesign

Several years ago, then-IRS Communications Director Jodi Patterson received a letter from the agency about her own tax return. "I had to read through it five times before I understood what it is they were saying," she says. It's fitting, then, that IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman in 2008 tapped Patterson to establish the Office of Taxpayer Correspondence and streamline the agency's convoluted automated correspondence system. Patterson hired New York design firm Siegel and Gale (the simplification gurus who in 1979 helped design the 1040EZ form) to diagnose the problem: Many IRS letters were largely redundant and often failed to clearly state their purpose, according to Siegel and Gale's investigation.

More than two years into the project, the IRS has redesigned 85 of the most commonly sent letters. New notices are based on nine prototypes, each of which has been tested for user-friendliness by a sample of 400 representative taxpayers. Among the hundreds of changes, big and small: The word "levy" now appears with a definition, "seize."

In April, the IRS simplification project took home the grand prize at the annual ClearMark awards from the Center for Plain Language, a nonprofit whose motto is "Plain language is a civil right."

'Icing on the Cake'

Among the lessons that other federal agencies should learn from the IRS simplification project, according to one of its directors, is that achieving the Plain Writing Act's goal of "communication the public can understand and use" may mean that plain writing alone is no cure for confusion.

"Plain language writing is really the icing on the cake," says Irene Etzkorn, who is Siegel and Gale's executive director for simplification. "Long before we get to the sentence and word level, we spend a lot of time on the structural aspects."

Happily, the Obama administration appears to understand that fulfilling the Plain Writing Act's purpose requires more than a plain writing gloss on convoluted information systems. Sunstein's guidance directs agencies to follow Federal Plain Language Guidelines developed by the group Cheek helped found, which stress organization, design and usability testing as integral to a plain language transformation. The White House can go further and explicitly make an outcome such as "comprehensibility" the standard by which Plain Writing Act implementation will be judged-rather than merely measuring inputs such as plans and annual reports to Congress.

Big Push

Another lesson from the IRS case study is the importance of support at the highest agency levels. The IRS' Patterson and Olson both stress Shulman's support of the initiative as key to penetrating the bureaucratic inertia that threatens any transformational initiative.

"I don't know that we would have been able to really push this through if we hadn't had support from the commissioner on down," Patterson says.

All agencies were required to designate a senior official in charge of plain writing training and execution by mid-summer. The director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau should consider assuming personal responsibility as its plain writing czar, and ensuring the new office practices what it regulates. That would send a powerful message to other agency heads that clear and effective communication to the public is not a mere byproduct of good government-it is good government.

Gadi Dechter is associate director of government reform at the Washington think tank Center for American Progress.

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Analysis: IRS aims for letter-perfect language

Gadi Dechter — Thu, 12 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400

The anecdote loses its humor when you consider that a "notice to levy" is an official warning that the government may garnishee your wages or seize your bank assets.

Even less funny: A full quarter of the people who received IRS letters in 2007 demanding proof of eligibility for a low-income tax credit didn't realize they were being audited.

"It's really astonishing," says Nina Olson, the IRS' national taxpayer advocate. "It just shows the real impact of poor communication."

The good news is that stories like these have prompted the tax agency to radically overhaul its automated correspondence system, which every year sends more than 200 million notices to taxpayers. The idea is that simplified, user-friendly letters written in plain English will speed the resolution of disputes and reduce the need for taxpayers to call in clarification. Each such call costs the agency $25, and it received 110 million calls in 2010 alone.

Officials elsewhere in government would be wise to pay attention. The IRS simplification project, now in its third year, is a good case study for the "plain writing" transformation all agencies will be required to implement this year under the little-known 2010 Plain Writing Act.

Ironically, the key lesson from the IRS initiative is that plain writing alone won't cure the government's gobbledygook problem. Communicating effectively means refocusing operations to consider the needs of the reader, not the bureaucracy. It means thinking about how information is designed and processed, as well as how it's written. It requires comprehension testing to ensure reforms are working -- and committed leadership from senior officials.

The Plain Writing Act
Under the bill signed by President Obama late last year, every federal agency by October 2011 must communicate to the public in "clear, concise, well-organized" language. The law does not cover regulations, but it does apply to all other documents that describe government requirements or services -- such as tax forms, letters, benefits applications, and Medicare and Social Security handbooks.

And there's an ethical imperative, too.

IRS case study
Several years ago, then-IRS Communications Director Jodi Patterson received a letter from the agency about her own tax return. "I had to read through it five times before I understood what it is they were saying," she says.

It's fitting, then, that IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman in 2008 tapped Patterson to establish the Office of Taxpayer Correspondence and streamline the agency's convoluted automated correspondence system.

Patterson hired New York design firm Siegel and Gale (the simplification gurus who in 1979 helped design the 1040EZ form) to diagnose the problem: Dozens of IRS letters were largely redundant, they used an "excessively authoritative" tone and often failed to clearly state their purpose, according to Siegel and Gale's investigation. The cumulative effect was to make taxpayers feel frustrated and helpless.

More than two years into the project, the IRS has redesigned 85 of the most commonly sent letters, accounting for 50 percent of the correspondence volume. New notices are based on nine prototypes, each of which has been tested for user-friendliness by a sample of 400 representative taxpayers. Among the hundreds of changes, big and small: The word "levy" now appears with a definition, "seize."

Grand prize
In April, the IRS simplification project took home the grand prize at the annual ClearMark awards from the Center for Plain Language, a Silver Spring, Md., nonprofit whose motto is "Plain language is a civil right."

Of course, the real test, Patterson acknowledges, is yet to come. May is the agency's busiest letter-sending month, and she hopes to have hard data soon. "The proof will be in the pudding," she says. "Do people pay more frequently and call less?"

Among the lessons other agencies should learn from the IRS simplification project, according to one of its directors, is that achieving the Plain Writing Act's goal of "communication the public can understand and use" may mean that plain writing alone is no cure for confusion.

The 'big breakthrough'
The "big breakthrough" on the IRS project, Etzkorn says, was when the consultants figured out that the agency's entire taxpayer correspondence apparatus, with its 120 authors and 44 discrete systems, really boiled down to two messages: Send us more money, and send us more information. From there they discovered they could whittle the content of about 700 letters down to fewer than 40, and developed a "content library" of boilerplate language proven in customized testing to be comprehensible to the average taxpayer.

The White House can go further and explicitly make an outcome such as "comprehensibility" the standard by which Plain Writing Act implementation will be judged -- rather than merely measuring inputs such as plans and annual reports to Congress.

If the average American doesn't understand what the government is saying, the government isn't speaking plainly, however simply written a document may be.

Next target: consumer bureau
Another lesson from the IRS case study is the importance of support at the highest agency levels. The IRS' Patterson and Olson both stress Shulman's support of the initiative as key to penetrating the bureaucratic inertia that threatens any transformational initiative. "I don't know that we would have been able to really push this through if we hadn't had support from the commissioner on down," Patterson says.

An obvious next place to showcase the potential of the Plain Writing Act: The nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, charged by Congress with making sure people comprehend complex financial products like mortgages and credit cards.

By mid-summer, all agencies must designate a senior official in charge of plain writing training and execution. Harvard law professor Elizabeth Warren, the unofficial acting director of the CFPB, should consider assuming personal responsibility as its plain writing czar, and ensuring the new office practices what it regulates.

That would send a powerful message to other agency heads that clear and effective communication to the public is not a mere byproduct of good government -- it is good government.

Gadi Dechter is associate director of government reform at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank.

This story has been corrected to state that the IRS sends 200 million notices per year, not notices to 200 million taxpayers.

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