CFO Council launches Web site to track agencies’ finances

The Chief Financial Officers Council, a group of federal financial officers, recently launched a Web site that posts information usually found buried in file cabinets.

The Web site lists agencies' fund balances in the general Treasury fund, timeliness of invoice payments and credit card delinquency rates, among other measures. The site also grades agencies' performance according to the traffic-light color scheme used by President Bush's management score card.

Linda Combs, chief financial officer at the Transportation Department and council member in charge of the tracking system, said the costs of posting the data were absorbed by the Office of Management and Budget, which oversees financial management at federal agencies.

The introduction of the tracking system marks the first time the public has been allowed to view detailed financial information about government agencies and make comparisons between them.

Taxpayers can now see, for example, how poorly the government performs on some measures, such as collecting debt. The Web site shows that most agencies received a "red" ranking, indicating poor performance, for being slow to collect debt from the public.

Transportation received the lowest ranking for having 97 percent of its debt owed by the public remain in accounts receivable for more than 180 days. Only six agencies, including Treasury and the Agriculture Department, earned a "green" ranking for holding less than 10 percent of their debt in accounts receivable for longer than 180 days.

The CFO Council also rated how often agencies pay vendors electronically, which the council said "saves money, reduces paperwork and improves cash management." The National Science Foundation and Office of Personnel Management pay 100 percent of their vendors electronically, while Agriculture pays only 42 percent of its vendors electronically.

Other measures, such as interest penalties for late payments and agencies' fund balance with the Treasury, have mostly green rankings.

Linda Springer, OMB's controller and chairwoman of the CFO Council, said the Web site will make it easier for financial managers to track how well their agencies are performing. "They can make sure bills are being paid on time and reconcile their cash with Treasury," she said.

Springer noticed the need for a tracking system when she first came to OMB from the private sector. "Individual agencies had their own metrics, but nothing that spanned across all of them," she said. She asked the CFO Council to start working on a better tracking system about a year and a half ago.

Now, she says, the federal government is providing even more information than private sector companies typically do, because in addition to being collected, information is also made public and available online. "We've gone beyond the private sector by making it user-friendly," she said.

"Before, it was very hard, almost impossible, to get this information," said Tabetha Mueller, spokeswoman for the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Efficiency and Financial Management.

Mueller said that the new system will make it easer for Congress to oversee financial management at agencies. If vendors for Homeland Security, for example, complain they are not getting paid on time, then congressional committees can use the tracking system to verify their complaints.

While some chief financial officers say they spend too much of their time on reporting requirements, Combs said there wasn't a "single person" in the CFO community who complained about it. She said that instead of seeing the tracking system as an additional burden, the CFO Council members saw it "as a system that we knew we needed to have on our own desktops."

Combs added that the CFO Council will meet over the next few weeks to decide what additional measures to add to the Web site.

Springer said likely additions include information on grants management and improper payments.