By Matt Mercer | 9 August 2012
Greater consistency and transparency is needed in US public sector financial data reporting to make the task facing government accountants easier, according to a leading US congressman.
Speaking at an Association of Government Accountants conference in San Diego, California, Darrell Issa, chairman of the House of Representatives’ committee on oversight and government reform, said state and federal government accounts were dealing with an ‘absolutely awful’ situation. ‘You start off with an incredibly bad type of data and then have to deal with it,’ he explained.
Last June, Issa introduced the Data Act, which would involve the establishment of an independent board to track all federal spending on a single website and require US government agencies to report data in a standardised format. The draft legislation has passed through the House of Representatives but is yet to be considered by Senate.
‘The Data Act will ensure accurate and complete spending is reported,’ Issa explained. ‘Ultimately, we have to manually separate the data received. We cannot trust the next administration to fix these problems either. They are ill-equipped. It shouldn’t be fraud protection for each agency, it should be government-wide.”
At the same event, Daniel Werfel, controller of the Office of Federal Financial Management at the Office of Management and Budget called for greater collaboration across the financial management community.
‘We are going to start with the architecture to make it much more aligned with shared services,’ he said. ‘Everything that is custom costs more. We need an architecture that enables us to employ shared services in a better way. We are making a movement toward a centralised ledger. This will materialise in the future.’
He also highlighted the importance of data-sharing. ‘We need to move toward a one-government approach. We have infrastructure in place that has been there for years, we are well-positioned to start game-changing approaches with data sharing amongst agencies.’
‘What will future controllers tell you about the pulse of 2012? Small is beautiful. We need to focus on the small things in government. We have a responsibility to be frugal with our taxpayer’s dollars. Getting the little stuff right is a big part of the concept.’
