Chief information officer authorities mandated under the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act and Office of Management and Budget requirements are lacking because agencies do not have a concise plan for effecting IT leadership change in line with those regulations, a Nov. 13 Government Accountability Office report found.

GAO studied four federal agencies — the Departments of Energy, Health and Human Services, Justice and the Treasury — as well as their components and found that while all four had made efforts to fulfill the eight OMB requirements for CIO authorities, they still fell partially or fully behind on some of those requirements.

“Where the departments had not fully established policies and procedures, it was due, in part, to having not addressed in their FITARA implementation and delegation plans how they intended to implement the OMB requirements,” the report said.

“Until departments develop comprehensive policies and procedures that address IT budgeting requirements established by OMB, they risk inconsistently applying requirements that are intended to facilitate the CIO's oversight and approval of the IT budget.”

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All four agencies were successful in establishing the level of detail that IT resources should be described for the CIO in the planning and budgeting process, but all equally failed at ensuring their CIO had reviewed whether the agency’s IT portfolio included appropriate estimates as part of the agency budget request.

“Specifically, the selected departments did not have IT capital planning processes for (1) ensuring government labor costs have been accurately reported, (2) aligning contract costs with IT investments, and (3) utilizing budget object class data to capture all IT programs,” the report said.

“This resulted in billions of dollars in requested IT expenditures without departments having comprehensive information to support those requests, and nearly $4.6 billion in IT contract spending that was not explicitly aligned with investments in selected departments' IT portfolios.”

GAO made 43 recommendations to the four agencies and their components for improving CIO authority planning. HHS, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, DOJ, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service agreed with the recommendations, while Treasury neither agreed nor disagreed.

The Department of Energy agreed with most of the recommendations but stated that it already had processes in place for addressing the proposed changes. GAO determined that DOE had not provided sufficient evidence to support that identified weaknesses were being addressed.

This is not the first time that GAO has found federal agencies falling short in CIO empowerment, An Aug. 2 review of all 24 CFO Act agencies found that none had fully addressed the role of the CIO as required by legislation and guidance.

About Jessie Bur

Jessie Bur covers federal IT and management.

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