RECOMMENDATION: GAO's quality management initiative should be built on the redefined mission and vision for GAO, and should be expanded to include considerations of what GAO does as well as how it does it. RECOMMENDATION: GAO should define more clearly the characteristics of quality work products and build them into standards, training, and project design. RECOMMENDATION: GAO managers should concentrate efforts on selecting and designing work to assure that its products are first-rate, well-documented, and grounded in fact. RECOMMENDATION: In addition to long-term improvements in work quality, work processes, and communications and relationships with Congress, GAO should also target significant, visible improvements that managers and employees can make in the near term to address employee and congressional concerns. Customer Focus A major emphasis of TQM adapted from private sector management is "customer focus." GAO defines its "customer focus" in the following way: "Understanding our customer's needs and expectations is the starting point for #45 The tension between meeting customer needs and maintaining objectivity and accuracy demands serious consideration. In interviews, GAO managers and planners cite executive agencies, nongovernmental groups, and taxpayers as "customers," but overwhelmingly emphasize "Congress as the customer." That 45 Continuous Improvement, 1991, p. 9. phrase is repeated extensively in GAO documents and discussions. While nongovernmental groups and executive agencies are important users of, and are affected by, GAO products and processes, Congress is the source of: most of the specific requests for GAO jobs; statutory mandates for GAO work; basic legislative authorization under which GAO conducts self-initiated studies; and appropriations that determine the resources available to GAO. Congress is the primary user of GAO's work; GAO devotes a large share of its staff time and resources to responding to committees' and members' needs for information and analysis. Many members view GAO as an institution created to serve them and as an extension of available staff resources. GAO's capacity to gather facts, look independently at information, and evaluate programs -- and the trust and credibility arising from that independence -- have formed the basis of GAO's usefulness to Congress. While Congress largely defines GAO's mission, the phrase "Congress as customer" does not clarify how GAO should carry out its mission. Congressional staff who call upon GAO for research and reports generally do not view themselves as "customers." In fact, according to interviews conducted for this study and documented by GAO from its 1992 congressional survey, the word "customer" makes many congressional staff members uncomfortable. Normally, a customer is a source of demand for a product or service, with a price system to manage demand and monitor quality. Congress, however, consists of multiple potential sources of demand for GAO work -- none of whom pay directly for the work or even know its cost -- and they have nearly unlimited and highly diverse demands for information and analysis. And the interests of those requesters are often in conflict with each other. - The major drawback of the phrase "Congress as customer" is that it does not help to identify GAO's primary roles and substantive functions. The phrase has created a perception among many interviewed for this study even frequent and supportive requesters of GAO work that GAO is overly willing to please the requesters, raising questions as to whether GAO conducts studies with an independent eye or whether, by contrast, it shapes the research with an eye toward satisfying the requester's policy or partisan interests. The panel found no evidence that GAO has been steering its research toward satisfying particular policy or partisan interests. The panel recommends, however, that GAO take additional steps to respond to the concerns that have been raised. While GAO has extensive standards and guidelines for procedures and outputs, including standards on supporting Congress, the materials refer to timeliness and frequent communications but do not provide substantive guidance to GAO staff on what it means to be "responsive" to congressional requesters in terms of the substance of the work." That term can have multiple meanings, with serious implications for 46 Policies/Procedures Manual, November 1992, Chapter 3, "Supporting the Congress." GAO's reputation for objectivity and credibility. Chapter VI takes a closer look at GAO's relations with Congress, including congressional members' and staffs' views of GAO, relations between congressional committees and GAO, Congress' use of GAO detailees, and congressional requests for GAO's work and assistance. RECOMMENDATION: As part of its overall quality management initiative, GAO should clarify the meaning of, and criteria for, being "responsive" to Congress, in order to give practical guidance to staff and provide assurance to Congress that GAO work will be objective, impartial, and independently derived. IV. GAO WORK PROCESSES Despite the diversity of tasks GAO performs, it tends to work in uniform patterns that produce reports in similar formats, writing styles, and approaches to expressing conclusions. While GAO leadership has made a commitment to quality management -- including continuous improvement in work products, reduced rework, and employee involvement -- GAO's quality control process remains hierarchical, expensive, time consuming, homogenizing, and uneven in its effectiveness. GAO's approach to audit and evaluation work focuses on formal processes, administrative procedures, and bureaucratic management techniques. The following sections describe how GAO generally conducts studies, as revealed in case studies and interviews made by the panel and project staff. Internal Design and Review of GAO Work GAO work originates in several ways, including congressional requests, statutory mandates, agency requests, and self-initiated proposals to carry out basic legislative responsibilities (BLRs). In fiscal year 1993, according to GAO's statistics, work requested by congressional committees or members or required in law took 80 percent of GAO staff-years of work; the remaining 20 percent of GAO staff-years went to self-initiated projects (BLRs). For the first quarter of fiscal year 1994, congressionally requested work dropped to 73 percent while the share accounted for by self-initiated work rose to 27 percent (see Table 4). TABLE 4 PERCENT OF GAO STAFF-YEARS SPENT ON CONGRESSIONALLY- In recent years, the work GAO classifies as self-initiated has largely consisted of: • General management reviews and specific management reports directed at executive users; The 1992 "high-risk series" 17 reports on areas identified as at high risk of waste, fraud, and abuse;47 Election-year transition reports, which summarize previous GAO work in major organizations and program areas; and After GAO issue area managers and staff and congressional requesters, if any, agree on a job request, the GAO staff estimates the budget expense and staff-years for the job and puts it on the jobstarts list, which the comptroller general and his high-level "job starts" group review. After GAO decides that it will undertake a particular study, GAO's internal work process generally fits the following pattern. The GAO Office of Congressional Relations sends any request letter to the appropriate issue area, whose director or assistant directors (or both) may already have discussed the item with the requester's staff. Issue area leaders discuss how to design the job and what staff to assign to it. Often, as noted in the previous chapter, GAO discusses with congressional staffs how to match the requester's objectives with GAO's priorities and resources." 48 The issue area director and assistant director(s) select an "evaluator in charge" (EIC) and identify needed participants from other GAO offices (e.g., economists, lawyers, auditors, accountants, investigators or other staff from other program-oriented issue areas), as well as the GAO field offices and staff members who will participate. Most GAO work teams come from within an issue area and associated core staff in regional offices. The EIC and assistant issue area director are responsible for assembling the complete job team, which may work out of Washington headquarters or out of a GAO field office. When field staff is involved in a project, headquarters-field interactions involve a considerable exchange of paper and travel. GAO is developing an enhanced computer network and improving electronic communications, partly to reduce that problem; however, GAO does not expect the agency-wide computer network to be operating fully until the end of 1995. For blue-cover reports, GAO often spends 8 to 18 months on research, audit, data collection, and drafting the text, all of which the EIC supervises. GAO's internal master job reports track, month to month, time and staff-year targets. In the early phases of project planning and initial research, however, high-level GAO leadership and supervisors devote relatively little attention to the design and conduct of work in progress. 47GAO/HR-93-1 through GAO/HR-93-17. 48Discussions between GAO and congressional requesters sometimes last for the life of the job, particularly when the research questions, objectives, and scope of work are not clearly articulated and mutually agreed upon. The panel's recommendation that GAO and requesters negotiate clear "terms of reference" for a project will alleviate much of that difficulty. |