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AGA NLC Begins with GAO’s Dodaro
AGA’s Sixth Annual National Leadership Conference kicked off Thursday morning with a record-breaking attendance of more than 700 and an address by Gene L. Dodaro, CGFM, chief operating officer, U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Dodaro began his remarks by acknowledging the enormous contributions of Comptroller General of the United States David M. Walker, CPA, who announced last week that he will leave the post in March after nearly 10 years in office to head a private sector foundation. Dodaro, who will serve as acting comptroller general until a new CG is named, pledged to continue GAO’s commitment to its mission as well as shining the light on the nation’s looming fiscal crisis—a hallmark issue of Walker’s tenure. “Dave has done a terrific job on a wide range of issues,” Dodaro said of Walker, “and we’ll continue to deal with those issues.”
Dodaro said he titled his presentation “Creating Momentum in a Time of Transition” before he knew his own agency would undergo a transition. He pointed to the upcoming presidential election and the change in administration as an opportunity and a challenge for the federal government. With just one transition in power since 1992, Dodaro acknowledged the significance of the first transition of power in a post-9/11 world and said the government needs to be ready to accept 3,000 new presidential appointees while maintaining the financial management progress that’s been made over the last decade.
In fiscal year 2007, he said, 19 of 24 CFO Act agencies received clean audit opinions, up from just six agencies in 1997. “But clean opinions,” he said, “isn’t the end game.” Issuing timely, relevant information useful to decision-makers continues to be a goal of the financial management community. “The accountability community needs to keep up the momentum going forward.” The federal government still has a disclaimer opinion on its consolidated financial statements, but Dodaro noted the huge accomplishment of issuing an unqualified opinion on the 2007 Consolidated Statements of Social Insurance as well as the recently issued eight-page citizen’s guide to government.
According to Dodaro, major
impediments to a clean governmentwide opinion include: Areas where progress is being made include: »
Estimates if improper payments. In 1997, he noted, there were no
estimates. “It’s hard to explain to the American taxpayer that tens
of millions of their dollars are being spent on payments that didn’t
need to be made,” he said.
The federal government’s long-term fiscal imbalance is an area where Walker and GAO have devoted a lot of effort. “We’ve got a long-term fiscal imbalance fueled largely by health care costs and changing demographics,” Dodaro said, adding the decisions going forward will be tough, but we need to make sure we’re not wasting money, and we need the systems in place to make decisions and deliver services to the American people. “It’s a huge challenge for all of us. It’s a huge challenge for our country.” He referred to the survey results issued by AGA yesterday, which reinforce the need for good governance, transparency and accountability. Big decisions are looming, he said, “and the accountability community will be under the spotlight in the next few decades like never before. So we need to be ready.” Dodaro explained the 1964 Presidential Transition Act, which provides federal funding to ensure the orderly transition of power from one administration to the next. With $8.5 million in the 2009 budget allocated to the transition, Dodaro said that with federal funding comes a responsibility for transparency. GAO is preparing for the transition and will make itself available to any member of the new administration who wishes to learn more about the particular management challenges facing agencies and the government as a whole. Also on GAO’s current agenda: »
Continuing to identify major risks to government as well as the 21st
century challenges and opportunities. He discussed GAO’s successful High-Risk Program, which he said has been an impetus for governmentwide reform because it promotes sustained attention by Congress to key problems. “Believe me,” he said, “if a program gets on the list, they want to get off as fast as they can. And it’s a lot easier to get on the list than to get off.” To get off the list, an agency or program needs the commitment of top leadership as well as a good plan and proof of concrete progress. “A plan is not enough,” he said. “It has to be executed.”NLC Speakers Discuss the Challenges of Various Generations Working Together, Insights into the 2008 Presidential Election
Jeffery H. Davis, M.Ed., a leadership development consultant, talked about the various generational challenges facing today’s work force. As Baby Boomers retire, they’re not mentoring the people they’re leaving behind, he said, which causes a brain drain, particularly in government. He defined the generations by the following age breakdowns: » Silent Generation/Greatest
Generation—ages 62–83 The silent generation is retiring, and quickly. Boomers comprise 45 percent of workplace and are decreasing slowly. Gen X makes up 30 percent of the work force and is increasing slowly as they come back to work after raising families or getting advanced degrees. Gen Y makes up 15 percent and is increasing fast. Three or four different generations are working together today, sometimes successfully, other times not, said Davis, a keynoter Thursday afternoon at AGA’s Sixth Annual National Leadership Conference (NLC) in Washington, D.C. Each generation is operating under assumptions about the other and give each other labels such as geezer, young buck, etc. “Your opportunity is to foster a synergistic environment where you get the best from everyone,” he said. “You’re going to need all the generations at work in order to be effective.”
Later, Jay Carney, Washington bureau chief for TIME magazine, told the NLC attendees about spending three years in Moscow writing about the fall of the Soviet Union. He said he felt depressed to land back in Washington because he feared his most exciting days as a reporter were behind him. During his first week covering Bill Clinton’s presidency, deputy White House counsel Vince Foster was found dead of a suicide although the cause of death is still debated, he said. This set in motion a tone for an administration that was “almost a circus” to cover, he said. Since then, Carney was on Air Force One on Sept. 11, covered the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and is now watching the most compelling presidential election in his lifetime. “It’s clearer now more than ever that I was wrong when I came from Moscow to a shocking series of events I’ve felt fortunate to cover,” Carney said. As the media watches the slow winding down of the Bush administration, Carney noted the interesting fact that there was no heir apparent in either party, which is why the election season started so early. He noted Republican Sen. John McCain’s remarkable political turnaround. McCain began as the front-runner candidate despite most of his party not liking or supporting him, and by last summer his campaign was written off as dead. “TIME and others wrote that it was highly unlikely that he could resurrect his campaign,” Carney said, noting TIME recently called him “the phoenix” in a cover story. Carney first wrote about McCain in 1997 and has covered him closely since. He said McCain has lived “one hell of a life,” militarily and personally. If he wins, he’ll be the oldest person to ever be elected to the White House, but Carney said he appreciates McCain’s ability to be himself in an era of tightly handled politicians. He noted the story in Thursday morning’s New York Times about a potentially damaging relationship McCain once had with a lobbyist. Carney questioned the timing of the article and said the way it was written was like “taking pumpernickel and white bread and trying to make pound cake from it.” The article neither proved a romantic relationship with the lobbyist nor did it supply evidence of influence bartering. While acknowledging the story could prove highly destructive to McCain’s campaign, Carney said it could also fade away just as quickly. “Some people close to him are more likely to accept that he had an affair than sold political favors to a lobbyist,” said Carney, noting McCain’s notorious intolerance for lobbyists. Carney joked that should the lobbyist story explode into scandal, “You can see Mitt Romney saying, ‘I only suspended my campaign.’ ” This presidential campaign, Carney said, is about replacing a president whose approval rating has dipped to an all-time low—the lowest sustained job approval ratings since Nixon. Conversely, Bush also enjoyed the highest sustained approval ratings of any modern president after Sept. 11. “People are just waiting impatiently for the Bush presidency to be over,” Carney said, which is shocking considering Bush was a hero to his party not that long ago. Republican issues are no longer resonating the way they used to—communism is dead, the Cold War is over, tax rates are low, and teen pregnancies and abortions have declined. “Conservatives within the Republican party are struggling to find a new identity for themselves,” Carney said. He talked about Democratic Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy and compared him to other “boutique” candidates of the past, such as Howard Dean. What makes Obama different, Carney said, is his ability to appeal to blue collar and “lunch bucket” Democrats by convincing them that he is not all rhetoric. “The Democrats, if they don’t blow it—and God knows they can still blow it—could be back in the cat bird’s seat with control of the White House and Congress,” he concluded. —By: Marie S. Force Admiral to NLC Attendees: Bring Value to Your Organization and Your Country
Admiral Thad W. Allen, the 23rd commandant of the U.S Coast Guard, spoke about leadership and vision on Friday, the final day of AGA’s Sixth Annual National Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C. “Every day you get up and go to work in government you have to be acting with strategic intent in an organization, and your organization owes you a strategic vision,” he said, adding that in the Coast Guard, employees either support the mission or execute it. “If you can’t understand how you do either of those things, either we haven’t properly explained the position or we don’t need it.” Once a link is made between what the agency is trying to do in the context of an individual’s work, “You have to give less orders, people know what they’re supposed to do. If everybody understands what you’re trying to do they self-synchronize.” Make strategy meaningful to the people in the work force and performance will follow, he said. “In the Coast Guard we try to lay out for everybody that we provide safety, security and stewardship in the maritime environment,” Allen said. “It’s a lot more complicated than that, but it is that simple.” Every organization must have three things: governance, a sense of what’s going on and the operational capacity to do something about it. The challenge for us moving forward, he said, is to tell those people who work for you, with you, and those you work for what they’re doing to bring value to the organization and the country. Financial management took a significant step forward with the passage of the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA), but there’s only so much we can do with GPRA or PART (Program Assessment Rating Tool) without congressional reform, he said. “We probably need to accept that we can’t reform Congress,” he said to laughter. Allen tells his people that there’s a lot more accountability in the world than there used to be and that “we’re under the unflinching glare of oversight, and there’s zero tolerance for failure in this town.” He urged attendees not to become too disillusioned. “The right thing is the right thing,” Allen said. “Your job is more important than you probably think it is. You provide the building blocks that lead to the body of knowledge that allow us to do what we do.” Allen also answered the following questions: What should
we be focused on as we prepare for the transition to a new
administration? What caused
the differences in results between FEMA and the Coast Guard in
Katrina? What do you
tell young people about the Coast Guard? It’s been
four years since the Coast Guard was made a part of the U.S.
Department of Homeland Security. How safe is the homeland and where
are the vulnerabilities?
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