The Office of Management and Budget has a lot of mission-critical areas open for improvement, according to the Government Accountability Office, and many of those areas involve the enhanced collection and management of government data.

GAO listed 31 priority open recommendations for OMB April 17 for this year. Six of the recommendations call on OMB to improve the transparency of spending data in the federal government. Specifically, GAO calls upon OMB to do the following:

  1. Clarify guidance on agency reporting requirements to the USAspending.gov site, to endure the completeness and accuracy of the data.
  2. Accelerate efforts to merge requirements under the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, which requires agencies to report their financial data to a single repository, with the earlier Government Performance and Results Modernization Act, which sets agency performance standards.
  3. Establish a set of clear data policies for governing the accuracy of agency data submissions.
  4. Provide agencies with additional guidance that addresses clarity, consistency and quality issues in DATA Act submissions.
  5. Provide the technical assistance needed for agencies to make their own determinations about DATA Act reporting requirements.
  6. Clarify existing guidance on the Primary Place of Performance category in DATA Act reports.

The report also called on OMB to create a forum for agencies’ differing styles of sexual violence data collection to consider whether those differences help or hinder the overall understanding of sexual violence in the U.S.

The 31 priority recommendations represent 148 open recommendations that GAO has made to OMB, which have yet to be addressed.

“Our teams will continue to coordinate with your staff on all of the 148 open recommendations, as well as those recommendations in the high-risk areas for which OMB has an important role,” wrote Comptroller General Gene Dodaro in a letter to OMB Director Mick Mulvaney that preceded the report.

Jessie Bur covers federal IT and management.

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