Agricultural Trade

Improvements Needed in Management of Targeted Export Assistance Program Gao ID: NSIAD-90-225 June 27, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) management of its Targeted Export Assistance (TEA) Program.

GAO found that: (1) the Foreign Agriculture Service (FAS) was not adequately documenting the funding allocation decision process to clearly show how funding criteria were applied and ranked and the basis for those decisions; (2) commodity division staff are not aggressively analyzing potential opportunities for their commodities in new markets or new ways of promoting those products in established markets; (3) there was no formal coordination among FAS divisions on cross-commodity and -country analyses; (4) FAS officials said that there were no set criteria for establishing contribution levels because they believed contribution amounts should be decided on a case-by-case basis; (5) narrowly targeted recruiting and the lack of technical training have adversely affected TEA Program management; (6) TEA participants complained that TEA guidelines were always changing, making it difficult to plan and administer programs; (7) combining the TEA Program with the FAS Market Cooperator Program would be a more efficient use of FAS resources; and (8) FAS does not adequately monitor the administration of the branded portion of TEA to ensure proper accountability for the resources made available.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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