Department of Energy

Although the Department of Energy (DOE) relies heavily on information in dealing with everything from massive environmental damage to unsafe nuclear weapons facilities, staff throughout the agency are not always receiving the information they need. This situation could increase the likelihood that the public will be unnecessarily exposed to dangerous contaminants; the safety and health of workers will not be adequately protected; outdated weapons components will continue to be manufactured and discarded; and facilities, secrets, and employees will not be adequately protected from threats. In addition, DOE is wasting money developing and running information systems that overlap or duplicate existing systems. These problems exist because DOE has not (1) implemented a strategic information resources management (IRM) planning process that focuses information resource investments on achieving strategic mission objectives and (2) exercised adequate management control to ensure that IRM activities are conducted in accordance with the law. Underlying DOE's ineffective IRM planning and management control is a lack of top management attention to managing information.

GAO found that: (1) DOE managers' abilities to fulfill their mission responsibilities are hampered by the inaccessibility of essential information, although DOE has many manual and automated information systems; (2) deficiencies include inadequate information systems, nonintegrated systems, lack of information timeliness, inaccurate, inconsistent, inaccessible, or insufficient data, limited analytical systems capabilities, and overlapping or duplicative systems, all of which waste resources; (3) DOE information resource investments are not focused on meeting strategic mission objectives because DOE has not linked its IRM planning to its strategic mission planning; (4) IRM planning is left to individual offices and contractors that have only parochial interests; (5) DOE does not clearly assign to the legislatively mandated designated senior official (DSO) the responsibility to prepare a strategic IRM plan that is linked to mission planning or authority over IRM planning activities; (6) headquarters program managers are unclear as to their responsibility and authority to control IRM planning activities, and do not consider strategic information resource needs in their mission planning; (7) senior DOE officials recognize the need to revise the IRM planning process to link it to mission planning and have included objectives to strengthen the IRM planning process in the DOE initiative to strengthen the IRM program; (8) internal controls are weak and are not always corrected when detected because control responsibilities are unclear and authority is limited; (9) DSO authority to require corrective action is not defined; (10) the Secretary has not identified IRM planning and control deficiencies as material internal control weaknesses, so they do not receive the emphasis that they need from top management; and (11) DOE recognizes the need to strengthen its IRM program and has implemented an initiative to do so.

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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