The Department of Health and Human Services lacks a “disciplined
process” for implementing its unified financial management
system, and it has not reduced associated risks to acceptable
levels, the Government Accountability
Office has said.
It said HHS began replacing five outdated accounting systems
in 2001 with the UFMS.
However, according to GAO, “the problems that have been identified
in such key areas as requirements management, including developing
a concept of operations, testing, data conversion, systems interfaces,
and risk management, compounded by incomplete IT management practices,
information security weaknesses, and problematic human capital
practices, significantly increase the risks that UFMS will not fully
meet one or more of its cost, schedule, and performance objectives.”
HHS is scheduled to deploy the UFMS at the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention in October 2004, but it lacks “sufficient
quantitative measures for determining the impact of the many process
weaknesses” GAO and others have identified to evaluate its project
efforts, according to GAO-04-1008.
The report called for well-defined requirements that could be
traced from the beginning to assure the system would work as
needed and that testing would root out defects before rolling
out the entire system, and noted that HHS has little time in
its schedule to correct those weaknesses and defects it does detect.
HHS is at risk of “not achieving its goals of a common accounting
system that produces data for management decision-making and
financial reporting and risks perpetuating its long-standing
accounting system weaknesses with substantial workarounds to
address needed capabilities that have not been built into the
system,” said GAO.