Federal Manager's Daily Report

Agency IT Spending to Get Continued Scrutiny

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has asked GAO to help it continue its oversight of agency IT spending, a topic that has been the subject of a number of prior reports and hearings in the committee.

A letter from the bipartisan leaders of the full committee and several subcommittees notes that IT acquisition is on the GAO high-risk list and has been the subject of several legislative reforms in recent years. It cited in particular the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act and the Modernizing Government Technology Act that was incorporated into the recently signed defense budget for 2018; that law allows agencies to place savings from IT improvements in a working capital fund for future use rather than losing that money.

The committee now wants GAO to:

“Identify FITARA implementation best practices, particularly from those agencies that have received high grades and/or have demonstrated significant grade improvements; evaluate agencies’ implementation of the Portfolio Review requirements in FITARA to ensure agencies are eliminating duplicative systems; identify and evaluate the top 15-25 mission critical IT acquisitions for the nation and report on the status of each of these IT acquisitions; identify and evaluate the top 10 legacy systems modernization initiatives for the nation and top 10 modernization successes in the last five years; and evaluate the current state of IT human capital, and identify challenges, strategies for success, as well as recommendations for improvement, in each of the major 24 federal agencies.”

The committee added that as with FITARA–on which it has issued a series of scorecards rating agency compliance–it “intends to conduct oversight to ensure effective implementation” of the MGT Act.

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