DOE Management

In recent years, Congress has reduced the Energy Department's (DOE) budget request for new obligational authority and has recommended that DOE use balances remaining from prior years' obligational authority that are carried over into the new fiscal year. DOE had $12 billion in such "carryover balances" from prior years as it began fiscal year 1995. In fiscal year 1995, DOE used nearly $1 billion in carryover balances to supplement its $18 billion in new obligational authority. Although DOE needs some carryover balances to pay for commitments made in prior years that have not yet been completed, the agency's large and persistent carryover balances have raised concerns within DOE and Congress that the agency is carrying balances that exceed the minimum needed to support its programs. This report discusses whether (1) DOE has an effective approach to identify the carryover balances that exceed its programs' requirements and may be available to reduce its budget request and (2) opportunities exist to develop a better approach for analyzing these carryover balances.

GAO found that: (1) DOE does not use a uniform, effective method of identifying carryover balances; (2) DOE makes separate, general estimates of excess funds in its individual programs; (3) some DOE programs have reduced their carryover balance while others have allowed their carryover balances to increase; (4) the DOE annual report on uncosted obligations is not used to identify potential carryover balances because it does not identify all of the carryover balances, identify all of the uncosted obligations that are available to reduce DOE budget request, or include enough information to be useful during the formulation of DOE budget; (5) within DOE, the Office of Waste Management has studied the operations of DOE programs and developed standard expectations for their levels of uncosted obligations; (6) the Office of Waste Management has determined that balances in excess of one month's worth of operating activities funding may indicate carryover balances and should be investigated; (7) within DOE, the Office of the Chief Financial Officer has suggested estimating the uncosted obligations at the start of each fiscal year using estimates of yearly costs or past costs; and (8) the various plans developed in DOE have not been implemented departmentwide and would need to be altered to fit individual programs.

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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