GAO cites best performance plan practices

Federal executives can improve their agencies' annual performance plans by indicating what results they expect to achieve with the money they spend, the General Accounting Office said in a recent report.

GAO said tying budget and staffing levels to performance goals is one of several ways executives can improve the plans, which are required under the 1993 Government Performance and Results Act. Under the act, agencies prepare annual plans that set goals for the following fiscal year. Agencies prepared their first performance plans for fiscal 1999 and recently submitted their second annual plans with their fiscal 2000 budget requests.

"Substantial further development is needed for these plans to be useful in a significant way to congressional and other decisionmakers," GAO wrote. "Some of the fiscal 1999 annual performance plans contain practices that, if consistently applied, should help improve the usefulness of subsequent agency performance plans."

In the report, "Agency Performance Plans: Examples of Practices That Can Improve Usefulness to Decisionmakers" (AIMD-99-69), GAO suggested that agencies show how budgets, capital assets and staffing levels lead to performance results. The IRS, for example, explained in its 1999 plan how the agency's $795 million fiscal 1997 budget for processing tax returns helped the agency meet timeliness and accuracy goals.

GAO also suggested that agencies show how they coordinate cross-cutting programs with other agencies. The Education Department described its plans to develop a database on school violence with the Justice Department. In their performance plans, both the Transportation and Justice departments noted their involvement in the war on drugs, coordinated by the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Another way executives can make plans more useful is by describing agencies' strategies for reaching goals, GAO said. For instance, the Agriculture Department's Food and Nutrition Service discussed its efforts to reduce illegal sales of food stamps for cash. The agency depends on grocery stores to properly handle food stamps, so the agency's plan notes that it has created a system of sanctions applied to stores that violate food stamp rules.

In all, GAO laid out 21 ways agencies can improve their performance plans, followed by examples of agencies that are using those best practices. Some of the report's other suggestions include:

• Use intermediate measures to gauge progress toward long-term goals.
• Show baseline and trend data for past performance.
• Discuss strategies for resolving serious management problems.
• Identify sources of data.
• Describe efforts to verify performance data.