State Department

In recent years, the State Department has been considering how "best practices" from the public and the private sector could be applied to key agency processes. Because State, like many private sector and government organizations, spends considerable sums each year to relocate employees around the world, this report (1) discusses States' process for transferring employees and their household goods overseas and (2) identifies best practices that State should consider adopting to reduce costs and improve services.

GAO noted that: (1) GAO's comparison of State's process for transferring employees and their household goods overseas to the processes of other public- and private-sector organizations suggests that State's procedures are overly cumbersome and inefficient; (2) State's employee transfer process has remained essentially unchanged for years and involves at least 12 agency bureaus and offices, over 150 support staff, and numerous administrative forms; (3) State employees transferring overseas are confronted with a myriad of steps and handoffs requiring individual transactions with multiple offices; (4) no single office within the Department is held accountable for ensuring the timely and successful transfer of employees and their families; (5) similarly, employees' household shipments are typically channeled through a maze of offices and contractors, resulting in unnecessary costs; (6) the Department of State has an opportunity to significantly streamline its employee transfer process, enabling it to provide better services to its employees and to reduce costs; (7) leading U.S. companies and other organizations have achieved these benefits by implementing a number of best practices, such as: (a) providing one point of contact for assistance to the employee, a method known as one-stop shopping; (b) centralizing the administration of transfers under one organizational unit and integrating various functions into that unit; (c) developing an integrated information system for tracking and coordinating transfers; (d) contracting with one freight forwarder to ship an employee's household effects, rather than using multiple vendors for the various segments of the same move; and (e) outsourcing various parts of the transfer process; (8) although GAO was unable to develop precise cost reduction estimates for implementing these best practices, several organizations indicated that they were able to achieve substantial cost savings by doing so; (9) in addition, GAO analyses of certain cost data and other information available at State, including some of State's own studies, indicate the potential for achieving similar cost reductions for the Department; and (10) for these and other reasons, GAO believes that the potential cost reductions could total millions of dollars annually.

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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