The recently enacted internal reforms for the General
Accounting Office (PL 108-271), allowing the agency
additional personnel flexibilities, may offer a glimpse of
the future for other agencies, since GAO has been using
its own employees as a testing ground for many of the
government-wide changes in personnel practices that it
advocates in reports and testimony before Congress.
One area where GAO has been particularly influential in
the “human capital crisis” debate, and the resulting
reform proposals, involves pay for performance. GAO, for
example, was instrumental last year in getting standards
on performance pay written into a Defense Department
authorization measure that not only cleared the way for
DoD to create its own personnel system–a process that is
still ongoing–but also authorized creation of a
government-wide “human capital performance fund” (that
fund, designed to reward good performers, currently
exists primarily on paper since Congress has provided
only token funding for it).
The GAO system–likely effective with fiscal 2005–will
have to include:
a link between the performance management system and
the agency’s strategic plan;
adequate training and retraining for supervisors,
managers, and employees in the implementation and
operation of the performance management system;
a process for ensuring ongoing performance feedback
and dialogue between supervisors, managers, and
employees throughout the appraisal period and setting
timetables for review;
effective transparency and accountability measures to
ensure that the management of the system is fair,
credible, and equitable, including appropriate
independent reasonableness, reviews, internal
assessments, and employee surveys; and
a means to ensure that adequate agency resources are
allocated for the design, implementation, and
administration of the performance management system.
Since GAO largely wrote its own ticket under that
legislation, those provisions are likely to reappear
in the context of pay reforms at other agencies, as well.
