In the Line of Fire

Andrew Maner has been ambitious enough to take on at least two "really, really intense challenges" in his career. "I'm not getting shot at on a regular basis," he says, putting a positive spin on his latest venture. "But I'm a target in many other ways."

He's talking about the job of managing the newest, and third-largest Cabinet department's finances, a task he accepted in January 2004. The difficulties he encounters as chief financial officer of the Homeland Security Department, he says, almost surpass those he faced coordinating nation-building efforts in Mogadishu, Somalia, where he served as special assistant to then-United Nations envoy Jonathan Howe in the early 1990s.

But it's a comparison he's loath to make because he doesn't want to diminish the importance of his work in Somalia, where people were dying as the United Nations and United States worked to bring stability to a region stricken by famine and civil war. There, he realized that he preferred management to the White House communications jobs he'd pursued after college.

"Somalia was pure and simple a management issue," Maner says. "Could you get food into the country, could you keep soldiers from dying, could you manage the politics around it all, back here in the United States."

In Somalia, he experienced immediate physical danger, a challenge absent at DHS. But his work there prepared him for the Homeland Security job in other critical ways. "We had nothing in Somalia," he says. "There was no handbook on how to do it. You did what you thought was the right thing to do, and you just did it."

Maner has an office now-modest in size and sparsely decorated. "Everyone wants to take a shot at Homeland Security," he says. "Irrelevant. We know what we have to do here."

There's the grunge work of bringing 22 separate agencies with more than 100 management systems under one roof, and ensuring that the department's relatively generous budget (Congress granted DHS $40.7 billion for fiscal 2005) is distributed properly.

As part of that effort, Maner recently hired consulting firm BearingPoint Inc. of McLean, Va., to develop eMerge2, technology capable of integrating the department's budget, accounting and reporting, cost management, assets management, and acquisitions and grants information to give program managers more timely and accurate data.

Maner also faces challenges common to most federal CFOs: closing the books on time and addressing material weaknesses identified in audits. He managed to come within days of meeting the Nov. 15 deadline for submitting fiscal 2004 financial paperwork to the Office of Management and Budget, and he's proud that the books were closed nearly three months earlier than they were last year, almost keeping pace with the other major agencies.

But Maner gets frustrated that outsiders so often expect Homeland Security to look like older departments. "They want us to be established and done and set up and open for business in every aspect," he says. "And it's not going to happen overnight."

Even the recently signed Homeland Security Financial Accountability Act asks DHS to lead other agencies in one respect. The law, which originated in the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Efficiency and Financial Management, chaired by Rep. Todd Platts, R-Pa., requires the department to obtain audit opinions on its internal controls-checks and balances designed to reduce the risk of fraud-starting in fiscal 2006. Homeland Security is the only federal agency required to obtain such an opinion.

Michael Hettinger, the staff director of Platts' subcommittee, says that even though Maner disagreed with some aspects of the bill, he remained responsive and cooperative. At one point, Maner even called Hettinger out of the blue to inquire about the status of the legislation. "That's somewhat rare for a CFO to call congressional staff and say, 'Hey, what are you guys up to?' " Hettinger says.

Efforts to institute strong internal controls are worthwhile, Maner says. But the government already has oversight bodies to review controls, such as the Government Accountability Office and inspectors general, he notes. Audits of internal controls are expensive-a difficulty he doesn't mention directly, but one that's cited by financial management experts.

There are only so many hours in the day. In Maner's case, many of those hours are taken up by budget problems within three of DHS' immigration and border security bureaus. When the Customs and Immigration and Naturalization services disbanded and regrouped into Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, substantial sums of money ended up at the wrong bureaus.

Maner helped ICE recover about $500 million in misplaced funds in fiscal 2004, says Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the bureau. The money was "vitally important" in helping ICE reach a stable financial position, he notes. Even with the boost, the enforcement bureau had to freeze all but essential spending for the last month of the fiscal year. The problems continue, congressional reports indicate, at the expense of activities deemed nonmission critical, including some training courses, travel and supply purchases.

"It's a bit of time every day in my existence in this department, and we're going to get it right," Maner says of ICE. He is comforted that despite financial problems, ICE agents posted record numbers of drug seizures and deportations of illegal immigrants last year. But he acknowledges that the bureau's budget woes are serious, and estimates that he spends 10 to 15 hours a week trying to resolve them.

This isn't the first time that Maner has had seemingly intractable budget issues to sort out, says CBP Commissioner Robert Bonner. Prior to accepting the Homeland Security CFO position, Maner worked for Bonner as CBP's chief of staff. There, he led the merger of elements from the old Immigration and Naturalization Service, Customs Service, Border Patrol, and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service-each with a separate pay system, uniform and culture-into a cohesive border agency.

He encountered "budget issues galore," Bonner says. "We didn't even have budget visibility until six months into it. We didn't have a unified budget until October 2003." Maner's "terrific sense of humor and self-effacing approach" helped him in that effort, Bonner says. "He's nonthreatening. He's a guy who knows how to listen. But he also knows what the goals are," Bonner says.

Maner says he hasn't had much trouble finding common ground among DHS employees. "You're going to have disgruntled people," he says. But the department is united by a sense of duty and a lot of "in-the-weeds work," he says. "It's not like you are some undersecretary or assistant secretary, and you sit in your office and someone comes in and brings you a document once in a while," he says. "We are in it."