A posting touting an Integrity system launched in 2015 comes at the annual May 15 deadline for filing a publicly viewable for certain senior political officials and senior career employees. Image: REDPIXEL.PL/Shutterstock.com
The Office of Government Ethics has said that automating the filing of both confidential and publicly-accessible financial disclosure forms “has saved thousands of hours of time” over its 10 years for federal employees who must file those forms and has reduced costs from more than $10 million a year to just above $4 million a year.
A posting touting the Integrity system, launched in 2015, comes at the annual May 15 deadline for filing the publicly viewable version, mainly applying to senior political officials and senior career employees in certain positions. May 15 was also the deadline for those who file the much more commonly filed version that is held within agencies for review who had received a 90-day extension from the standard deadline for them.
Before that system’s launch, the filing system began with filers “stocking up on pens and correction fluid, before sitting down with the paper form or a static electronic form and, in many cases, stacks upon stacks of continuation pages to transcribe bank statements, mortgage documents, and brokerage holdings,” it said.
Among improvements that the online form “prompts them to file more accurately and completely” and allows them to “start each year’s report with the information from previous filings which increases accuracy and reduces the burden of filing.”
Similarly, it said, ethics officials who review those forms faced a “flood of forms in mail rooms and inboxes across the government. These forms arrived by every imaginable conveyance; certified mail, telefax, email attachments, and some just slipped under the office door; tracked with a menagerie of spreadsheets, checklists, and paper ledgers. Reviewing them unleashed a torrent of sticky notes, red pens, and emails as ethics officials manually worked through each entry.”
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