High-Risk Series

In 1990, GAO began a special effort to identify federal programs at high risk for waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement. GAO issued a series of reports in December 1992 on the fundamental causes of the problems in the high-risk areas; it followed up on the status of these areas in February 1995. This, GAO's third series of high-risk reports, revisits these troubled government programs and designates five additional areas as high-risk (defense infrastructure, information security, the year 2000 problem, supplemental security income, and the 2000 decennial census), bringing to 25 the number of high-risk programs on GAO's list. The high-risk series includes an overview, a quick reference guide, and 12 individual reports. The high-risk series may be ordered as a full set, a two-volume package including the overview and the quick reference guide, or as 12 separate reports describing in detail these vulnerable government programs. GAO summarized the high-risk series in testimony before Congress (GAO/T-HR-97-22).

GAO found that: (1) a major contract reform effort now under way and receiving high priority and visibility at DOE raises expectations for improvement; (2) responding to continued criticism of DOE's contract management, in 1993 the Secretary of Energy established a Contract Reform Team; (3) the Reform Team evaluated the Department's contracting practices and, in its February 1994 report, recommended nearly 50 actions to fundamentally change DOE's contracting practices; (4) in response, DOE has made progress in developing an array of policies and procedures; (5) in addition, DOE is including incentives to improve performance and control costs in its contracts; (6) DOE also has initiated a new approach for some environmental cleanup work in an attempt to shift much of the risk and responsibility onto the contractor; (7) although DOE has made headway, most of the completed actions were delayed, which will push back the implementation of the final reforms accordingly; (8) the changes proposed in DOE's current reforms, which are unprecedented in scope within DOE, provide a comprehensive plan to address the problems resulting from its past contracting practices; (9) this effort will require time as the current contracts are either competitively awarded or noncompetitively renewed with the reform provisions incorporated into the contracts; (10) continued high-level monitoring and oversight by DOE will be needed to identify problems, standardize the best practices, and make needed corrections as DOE makes its way through these changes; and (11) DOE should competitively award its management and operating contracts to the greatest extent possible and link the contractors' goals to DOE's strategic goals.