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) while HUD has formulated approaches and initiated actions to address four Departmentwide management deficiencies, HUD's planned actions are far from complete; (2) in 1995, HUD fully implemented its new management planning and control program and reported that it had only 9 material internal control weaknesses; (3) HUD's Office of Inspector General, however, has questioned the effectiveness of HUD's management control program and the department's process for closing out three of eight material weaknesses during fiscal year 1995; (4) despite its importance as a management control tool, HUD's monitoring of program participants continues to be a problem area; (5) HUD continues to make progress in improving its information and financial management systems, but much work remains; (6) despite these efforts, some of the projects that involve major improvements to HUD's financial and information management systems will not be completed before the year 2000; (7) HUD still has 93 systems that do not comply with the Federal Managers' Financial Integrity Act and therefore cannot be relied upon to provide timely, accurate, and reliable information and reports to management; (8) HUD's efforts to improve its systems have been hampered by problems with systems development, funding constraints, and data conversion problems; (9) to improve organizational structure, HUD completed a field reorganization that eliminated its regional office structure and transferred direct authority for staff and resources to the Assistant Secretaries and plans additional reorganization efforts; (10) HUD has made some progress in addressing the problems with staff members' skills and with resource management; (11) although HUD has just begun to evaluate the effectiveness of its stepped-up training efforts, the directors GAO surveyed generally believed that the skills of their staff have improved over the past 2 year; (12) since GAO's 1995 report, HUD has also continued efforts to restructure and consolidate its current wide array of programs, an outcome GAO believes is important to reducing HUD's risks to an acceptable level; and (13) the problems of inadequate staff resources to monitor and administer HUD's current array of programs likely will be compounded as HUD implements its downsizing plans over the next 4 years, unless actions are taken to consolidate, reduce, and reengineer HUD's existing programs.