REAPPROPRIATION AUTHORITY

The last issue we need to hit before the supplemental is this reappropriation authority you are requesting.

You mentioned it earlier in your remarks. I am not sure that you have not made a reasonable point, but I am not sure it is any different from the point that any other manager of Federal dollars would make who have the kind of program you do.

I am not sure we have the authority to grant you the ability to carry over funds under the circumstances even if it were within the desire of this committee.

We think this would violate the Rules of the House and the Budget Control Act of 1974. Do you have any response? Have you looked into the legality?

Mr. LANDRY. I will check that part of the Budget Control and Impoundment Act.

Mr. FAZIO. The staff reminds me as well it is subject to a point of order should anybody disagree with your legal interpretation. It could be discretion is the better part of valor here. It might be better to try to find an alternative or to perhaps suffer as others do.

Maybe we could discuss staff-to-staff how others have handled this problem.

Mr. GIBBONS. I would appreciate the opportunity for us to do that, Mr. Chairman. I brought it up because

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Mr. FAZIO. There are other people here. In fact, you may wish to take a few minutes to explain the problem. I have been jumping ahead.

Mr. GIBBONS. For Mr. Lewis and Mr. Campbell, in the request for reappropriation, I brought up the point rather peculiar to OTA. Much of our work on these big assessments requires more than a year to get it done.

Meanwhile, we must allow for interruption of that work, and therefore a shifting schedule, in order to move people-in order to extract from that work or prior work information that is needed at that moment for congressional committees, so although we set up and plan out the year as best we can on a study, whenever an interruption occurs, we have to allow for that to be responsive to Congress. It moves some of our costs between fiscal years.

Therefore, I have a great deal of difficulty sometimes in making the right match across the end of the fiscal year.

A delay of a couple of weeks can shift a major expense out of one year into the other. Well, you might be tempted to go on and spend it before the year is gone because otherwise you have to go into next year's appropriation and let this year's lapse.

That is a temptation I want to avoid. I managed last year to avoid it. We returned over $300,000 to the Treasury because we refused to go ahead on a couple of contracts we were concerned about in terms of the quality.

We delayed printing because we had some quality control work to do on the end of a document.

So there were very valid management reasons for deferring a cost, but in doing so we lost the ability to use those funds and had to, as it were, transfer that mortgage to the next fiscal year.

If I had perhaps even five percent of my annual appropriation that was independent of the end of that fiscal year, even if I were charged to spend it within 60 or 90 days into the next year, it would give me a lot better management freedom.

Whether or not, as the Chairman points out, that is legal or possible, we don't have an in-house lawyer to tell us about that. I would appreciate the opportunity to work with your staff to see what might be done there.

Mr. FAZIO. At this point I think it would lead to a situation that is probably a violation of the rules. We would be happy to discuss it with you and see whether we could provide suggestions as to how others deal with that problem.

Mr. GIBBONS. Thank you. I would appreciate that, Mr. Chairman.

PRIVATE REVIEW OF OTA

Mr. FAZIO. As I understand it, there has been a private CPA financial accounting performed on OTA. Members of the subcommittee have obtained this. We will insert it in the record at this point.

[The information follows:]

INTRODUCTION

The work

described herein is designed to provide assistance to the Director of the Office of Technology Assessment and the new Chairman in assessing the soundness of The Office of Technology Assessment's basic financial system and determining what, if any, actions need to be taken to comply with basic Governmental requirements.

We express Our sincere appreciation for the courtesy and cooperation extended to US by all the employees of The Office of Technology Assessment and The General Accounting Office. We would be pleased to recommendations and provide any assistance in their

discuss Our

implementation.

Whelan, Barsky. Matelis & Company, Chartered

CEREC ACCOUNTANTS

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