USDA Financial Systems

To manage its $146 billion in assets and to account for $75 billion in expenditures for fiscal year 1994, the Agriculture Department (USDA) used 115 separate financial management systems that performed overlapping and similar functions. These systems are not integrated, contain inconsistent and inaccurate data, and are plagued with internal control weaknesses. To address these problems and carry out its financial management system responsibilities under the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, USDA began implementing a project in 1993 known as the Financial Information Systems Vision and Strategy. This report discusses whether the project will (1) resolve USDA's major financial system weaknesses and (2) consolidate USDA's separate financial and mixed systems that perform similar functions, as well as reengineer USDA's financial processes.

GAO found that: (1) the USDA Chief Financial Officer (CFO) has demonstrated strong leadership and progress in implementing the initial phase of the FISVIS project; (2) CFO has issued departmentwide financial management standards and has signed a contract for the central Foundation Financial Information System; (3) it is unclear when USDA financial and mixed systems will be brought into compliance with the new financial standards, since CFO does not have the authority or a mechanism to enforce compliance and will have to rely on the voluntary cooperation of the USDA component agencies; (4) although USDA is planning to give CFO greater responsibility and authority over its financial systems, the major component agencies will manage their own financial systems with limited CFO oversight; (5) CFO lacks a configuration management policy and version control process for the Foundation system software to lower costs and prevent duplication; (6) FISVIS does not address eliminating or consolidating the many USDA systems that perform similar functions and has not been revised to consider reengineering financial management processes on a departmentwide basis in light of the ongoing USDA reorganization; and (7) although USDA has not addressed all aspects of its financial management systems, it plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to redesign or replace many of its existing financial and mixed systems.

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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