Republicans blast agencies' spending on Y2K efforts

Federal agencies are not properly tracking the money they're spending to solve the year 2000 computer problem, House Republicans charged this week.

On Monday, House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, Rep. Steve Horn, R-Calif., and Rep. Connie Morella, R-Md., released a General Accounting Office report criticizing the way agencies account for Y2K costs. The federal government estimates it will spend a total of $7.5 billion on solving the Y2K problem from 1996 to 2000. But many agencies cannot say how much they have spent so far on Y2K issues, the General Accounting Office found.

"The most startling discovery GAO made is that 9 major federal agencies didn't even bother to keep track of how they spent dollars specifically appropriated to fix the Y2K problem," the lawmakers said in a statement. "Much of the information GAO did receive was overly vague and unacceptably incomplete."

GAO found that only seven of the 24 largest federal departments and agencies track actual costs for Y2K work. Five agencies tracked some actual costs and estimated the rest of their Y2K spending, nine agencies only estimated spending, and three-Agriculture, State, and Treasury-did not provide GAO with any spending information.

"When the hard-earned dollars of American taxpayers are designated for a specific purpose, guesses are not good enough," Armey, Horn and Morella said.

Agencies estimate they will spend $2.8 billion on Y2K work in fiscal 1999. Congress provided much of that money to agencies in last year's omnibus appropriations bill, which targeted $2.25 billion for civilian agencies and $1.1 billion for the Defense Department to work on solving the year 2000 problem.

The Defense Department has allocated $524.5 million of its emergency funds for testing, $148 million for operational evaluations, and $262.4 million for contingency planning.

Civilian agencies are splitting up emergency Y2K spending as follows:

• $607 million on renovation, validation, and implementation
• $87 million for outreach activities
• $86 million for independent verification and validation
• $50 million for contingency planning
• $32 million for assessing and replacing embedded systems
• $571 million for other activities-primarily replacement of non-compliant personal computers and network hardware and software.