Increase Customer Feedback to The GAO

Improve the Effectiveness of the General Accounting Office Through
Increased Customer Feedback

Background

One important duty of Congress is to oversee the operations of the
executive branch. Congress has several formal mechanisms to conduct its
oversight. These include hearings, agency reports, and audits and
evaluations by agency Inspectors General and its own General Accounting
Office (GAO).

According to the Comptroller General, "The GAO assists the Congress in
its legislative oversight of the executive branch. We see our mission as
seeking to achieve honest, efficient management and full accountability
throughout government. We serve the public interest by providing Members
of the Congress and other policymakers with accurate information,
unbiased analysis, and objective recommendations on how to best use
public resources."(1) By implementing this mission, GAO plays an
important role in assuring and improving the leadership and management
practices of the executive branch.

GAO, under the leadership of Comptroller General Charles Bowsher, began
a formal Total Quality Management (TQM) initiative almost three years
ago.(2) "The agency's commitment to quality is the single most important
principle governing its work. We define high-quality work as (1)
objective and independently derived; (2) accurate, timely and
meaningful; and (3) presented in a way most useful to responsible
officials."(3) This initiative, with its strong focus on customers and
continual improvement, has already pointed the organization in a
direction to achieve these goals.(4) For example, GAO recognizes the
importance of crediting and publicizing best practices during an audit
as well as documenting problems. Another example is that it intends to
develop and institutionalize feedback loops from the executive branch.
This feedback would give it information that it needs to improve its
value-added contribution to better government.

Need for Change

GAO is perceived by many managers in the executive branch agencies as
being less effective than it could be in providing useful oversight that
leads to constructive changes. For example, GAO audits have often
documented only negative findings. These audits often did not report
best practices when they were uncovered, in part because staff believed
they were not encouraged to report success.

A root cause of the perceived effectiveness gap is that GAO currently
lacks an institutionalized feedback loop from the executive branch
agencies, either individually or collectively. A feedback loop--such as
a questionnaire or interviews on the effectiveness of a GAO
review--would provide GAO management with information on how useful its
reports and reviews have been in pinpointing and solving problems.
Currently, GAO does not collect the information it needs to continually
improve the value and impact of its services. GAO's "Yellow Book," which
sets federal auditing procedures and standards, clearly recommends
describing "noteworthy accomplishments," as part of audits, but it only
partially addresses the need for feedback loops.(5)

Endnotes

1. U.S. General Accounting Office, The Role of the General Accounting
Office, GAO/T-OPP-93-1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office
[GAO], June 10, 1993).

2. Ibid, pp. 16-17.

3. Ibid, p. 2.

4. U.S. General Accounting Office, Quality Improvement Plan: An Update,
"Continuous Improvement: The Quality Challenge," March 1993.

5. U.S. General Accounting Office, Government Auditing Standards
(Washington, D.C.: GAO, 1988 Revisions), pp. 7-10 and 7-11.