If laws produced virtue, we’d all have halos. In reality laws sometimes produce next to nothing, at least initially.
Case in point: the 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act. That well-intentioned piece of legislation was supposed to bring transparency by having agencies adopt uniform standards for tagging spending data. But as implemented, it’s not working out that way.
Those pesky Government Accountability Office auditors checked out the data posted at USAspending.gov. Under the law, GAO is supposed to check things periodically. When it comes to budget data, agencies get about a “C.” GAO is 95 percent confident that three-quarters of the website data matches agency records. But on contracts and grants spending, forget about it. GAO found that between 0 and 1 percent of posted data matches agency records.
Keep reading this article at: https://federalnewsradio.com/tom-temin-commentary/2017/11/data-act-so-far-so-meh/
It took federal agencies’ four years to go from introduction to implementation of the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, so what will it take to get 2,300 grant-making programs and 3,200 procurement offices to do the same?
Last week’s announcement that the General Services Administration had updated its Dun & Bradstreet contract will allow agency acquisition personnel and contractors wider latitude to use the standardized company information for purposes beyond mere identification.