Accountability & Transparency within Federal and State Agencies

Last week, Brainware exhibited at the National Leadership Conference for the Association of Government Accounts (AGA) in Washington, D.C. The event drew more than 600 government CFOs, financial managers, technologists and consultants. The agenda centered on two themes: Accountability and Transparency. On the one-year anniversary of the historic $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, effective financial management and insight has never been more critical. To put things in perspective, Danny Werfel, OMB’s Controller stated that his number one priority is eliminating the staggering $100 billion (yes, that’s “billion”) in Improper Payments made by the federal government each year. With the amount of money the Fed is pouring into the economy and the resulting debt burden that will follow American taxpayers for years, even decades to come, there is no excuse for mismanagement of funds.

Government executives must invest in the tools and technologies to gain strategic insight into this spend, and not focus solely on transaction processing. The role of the government CFO has changed in the 20 years since the CFO Act of 1990 was first enacted, yet there’s still a broad tendency among federal financial managers to favor the accounting function over the management function. AGA has been a strong advocate for education and awareness – promoting this shift in thinking and highlighting the successes among those individuals and agencies that are leading the way. Government is taking measured steps to consolidate functions such as Accounts Payable operations into interagency shared service centers, which will not only reduce the cost per transaction, but will allow for broader and deeper insight into spend data. Change is on the horizon, but the question for all of us is whether it can happen fast enough.

Invoice and payment processing technologies and best practices are being successfully adopted by the world’s largest companies and are yielding millions in bottom line impact to their respective firms. These initiatives are transformative - streamlining invoice receipt, approval, and payment processing. They not only cut costs, but they deliver the management information to finance executives to drive working capital optimization, spend rationalization, and the control and insight to eliminate waste. Federal, State, and even Local government finance leaders need to take a page out of the playbook of the best in the private sector and adopt these technologies and practices. They’re delivering immediate and significant results.