Results Act

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) fiscal year 1999 annual performance plan.

GAO noted that: (1) although HUD's annual performance plan includes information in each of the areas required by the Government Performance and Results Act, it does not present a clear picture of what HUD expects to achieve with the funds it receives for its program activities; (2) the plan does not cover all the program activities in HUD's budget, and consolidations and aggregations of program activities are not clearly explained within the plan; (3) while the plan refers to some of HUD's crosscutting activities, it does not fully discuss how HUD will coordinate with other agencies having related goals or define its contributions to the crosscutting activities; (4) the plan discusses the programs that fall under each of HUD's strategic objectives but does not fully discuss the strategies the agency intends to pursue to achieve its performance goals and indicators; (5) it also does not provide a complete discussion of the resources needed to achieve the performance goals; (6) although discussing some of HUD's verification and validation procedures, the plan does not relate HUD's systems to specific indicators or discuss all of the systems from which performance data will be extracted; and (7) the performance plan generally does not discuss the data's limitations or their possible effects on the performance indicators.