AGA TOPICS Newsletter
From the
National President
Jeffrey
S. Hart, CGFM, CFE
View images from Jeff's
travels
With this last column of mine, I
first want to thank everyone that encouraged and supported me, recap
what we accomplished together this year, and share a few personal
thoughts about the exciting future I see for AGA. There are so many
people to thank, and so much else I want to share with you, I hope
you’ll be patient with me this one last time.
Thanks!
First and foremost, let me thank
you, the entire AGA membership, now almost 15,000-strong, for the
honor and privilege of serving as your National President. You, and
the mission of advancing government accountability that we are all
passionate about, are the reason AGA exists.
Next I’d like to thank the Honorable
Nikki Tinsley, retired EPA Inspector General, and my new boss,
Acting Inspector General William Roderick, for supporting me in
accepting this role and encouraging me during the year.
Thank you to the AGA chapters and
their leaders that provide the vast majority of benefits and
services our members enjoy. Our chapters and the members they serve
will always be the bulwark of our association. Eighty percent of
our members have never attended a national AGA conference, and the
AGA they rely on and know best is the AGA that exists right there in
their home town.
In fact, the best part of this job
by far has been the time I was able to spend with you all. I
participated in 45 chapter and regional events, and in every case
you went out of your way to make sure every detail was taken care
of, and make me feel welcome. Because I was active myself at the
chapter and regional level for over 30 years, I thought I knew all
about chapters. However, what I learned was that once you’ve seen
one chapter, you’ve seen one chapter. Every one of the chapters I
had the privilege to visit had things about them that made them
special, different than every other chapter, and gives them each
reason to be proud. I left each chapter meeting just bursting with
pride and amazement for the outstanding programs you deliver for
your members and everything you do for our profession.
Next I’d like to thank our wonderful
AGA National Office staff. I don’t need to tell you how wonderful
they are, because 2,000 of you told me yourselves in the membership
survey we did last year. In fact, you rated our staff higher than
any of the other elements measured in the survey. So clearly, you
love them as much as I do. Personally, I could not have survived
this year without their support and patience, especially when I was
late in submitting my column for this very publication.
In fact, I’d like to recognize, by
name, each and every AGA member and National Office staff member
that helped and supported me and contributed to AGA’s
accomplishments this year. The only reason I won’t is that the list
would be very long, and I’m afraid I might unknowingly leave someone
out. Anyway, you know who you are.
Last, but certainly not least, I
want to thank Roxy, my wife of over 30 years, and my entire extended
family for their support as I came and went, sometimes missing
birthdays and other family events, several school concerts, and a
high school graduation. I look forward very much to spending more
time with you all.
The Year in
Review
When I was passed the gavel last
year, I said I was Excited to Serve as your National President, and
I asked you to get excited too because we have lots of good reasons
to be excited. I asked for your help, and promised you that every
ounce of energy you put into AGA would come back to benefit you in
real, tangible ways.
Getting excited is a simple choice
we each have, and I asked each of you to make that choice by getting
excited about the important work we’re doing in AGA and as
government accountability professionals. And you responded. You
made that choice, it has paid off for all of us, and I thank you for
that.
I started the year by telling you a
little about my journey to the AGA National Presidency, how I became
fearless in my approach to life, and how the people and experiences
of my life prepared me for this job. I approached my role as
National President with the same fearlessness, which I think allowed
me to contribute in ways I couldn’t have otherwise. Any of you that
have read my first column in Topics, or heard me speak at a chapter
event, have heard me remind us that life is short, and how we all
have the power to liberate ourselves from the fear that comes with
putting ourselves out there, taking a risk, and trying to leave
things just a little bit better than we found them. And I think
we’ve done that—together.
What would you
like to be remembered for?
That’s what a friend and AGA colleague asked me about my tenure as
AGA National President. Since I usually “begin with the end in
mind,” that was an easy question for me to answer. I’d most like to
be remembered as someone who helped remind us that our ultimate
purpose as an association is all about creating value, or in
other words, making a difference. I also hope that I have helped
inspire us to up the ante and create truly exceptional value.
You may recall that I’ve used that term—value—in two
important ways this year.
First, with input from
many of you, we developed what’s called a “logic model” that
describes what we have come to call
The
AGA Value Proposition.
This is the latest version that includes changes based on the input
many of you gave me as I shared this document with you as I
crisscrossed the country. One important difference in this latest
version is the red text you see. The red text identifies those
things that not only “AGA National” does or is responsible for, but
things that apply also to our chapters. So, looking at this revised
version, it’s easy to see that almost everything AGA does is done by
all of us. We are jointly responsible, and we all can
and should take equal pride in the outcomes or results!
A logic model is
simply a picture or diagram, along with some words, that tells a
story. In this case, it tells how AGA uses its resources, including
your dues money, to create value. It lays out how we use those
resources to implement programs and conduct various activities to
produce specific outputs, and how these outputs collectively
contribute to or result in all these various outcomes. Among the
most important of these outcomes are
-
Increased Value of Individual AGA Members,
-
Increased Value of Members' Employers,
-
Increased Value to the Government Accountability Profession,
-
Increased Government Transparency & Accountability,
-
Increased Public Trust in Government, and
- A
More Healthy and Vibrant Democracy
Those are lofty goals. I believe in
them, and I hope you do too. Some of you have seen and heard me
explain The AGA Value Proposition as I’ve traveled around the
country visiting with you. And the approximately 2,500 of you that
I’ve met with have told me that, yes, you believe in these goals
too. You’ve told me that the model does what I had hoped it would
do—inspire you and help you to better understand and appreciate the
full value of your membership, and position you to more effectively
explain that value to others and hopefully persuade them to join or
become more active in AGA.
The second way I’ve used the term
“value” is in reference to our four core AGA values—Service,
Accountability, Integrity and Leadership—in an effort to
help remind us of who we are at our core. Missions may change,
programs may change, volunteer and National Office leadership may
change, but our core values remain constant, and should serve to
guide us in everything we do, now and into the future.
What would you like to be remembered
for? It’s a good question
for each of us to ponder—personally, professionally, and as an
association
We’ve accomplished some great things
this year, and I really want to emphasize that word, “We”.
Because nothing happens in AGA simply based on the ideas or actions
of any one person—not me, not our esteemed Executive Director, or
any other single AGA volunteer or staff member. Whatever we’ve
accomplished in AGA this year or in any other year has been the
result of the collective and collaborative efforts of many people,
in some cases over multiple years. It’s not just what happens in
the National Office, or on the National Executive Committee, or in
the chapters. It’s not just what the paid staff does any more than
it is just what the volunteer leadership and chapters do. We are
“One AGA”, and it’s truly a team effort. It has to be. And we can
and should all take pride in AGA’s collective accomplishments. So
when I speak of what “we” have accomplished this year, each one of
you should rightly take great pride.
As I hope you all know by now, I
chose the theme, Creating Exceptional Value for Government
Accountability Professionals to help guide us this year.
And here’s how we, all of us, based on our core values and our
shared passion for government accountability, created new value for
you, the AGA member, for your employer, and for all the people who
rely on and pay for government.
As far as our core value of
Service, I said we were going to find new and better ways to
serve you, and we have. We started by carefully reviewing all the
valuable input that almost 2,000 of you provided in our May 2006 AGA
member survey. I’ve asked that a similar survey be conducted
annually, so that we can continue to provide exceptional value and
report on our progress. You told us that networking was the number
one thing you value in AGA, followed closely by education. While
those of you that attend our national conferences told us you love
them, as I mentioned earlier, 80% of you told us that you get your
AGA networking and educational services primarily through your local
chapter. So we’ve developed some new tools for members and chapters
and done several other new things to ensure that your chapter is
positioned to make your lives easier and help you deliver the
highest quality events possible. Most importantly, for the first
time we brought together chapter, regional, and national volunteer
AGA leaders and key members of our National Office staff to meet
over two days at Sectional Leadership Meetings (SLMs) held in each
of the four sections or quadrants of the country. According to the
participants, these SLMs were a huge success and provided volunteer
leaders with the tools they needed to succeed.
While net membership is up for the
second consecutive year, 80% of our members are baby boomers already
beginning to retire. Because finding new members and developing AGA
leaders of tomorrow is essential to AGA's future, we established a
task force under the leadership of Senior Vice President Jim Turkett
to answer the question, "How can we further improve the recruitment
and retention of early career members?" The NEC will review this
report this week and we will begin sharing the results of that
review at the PDC in Nashville.
Under our second AGA core value--Accountability—I
said we would aggressively seek out new and exciting ways to advance
government accountability and we did.
We held our first
National Internal Controls and Fraud Conference in Atlanta, GA,
which is one of the new and exciting ways we are creating value for
you in AGA. If you missed it last September, you missed one of the
best national conferences AGA has ever produced. You would have
been proud.
Another exciting way we found to
advance government accountability was to research the feasibility of
expanding AGA internationally. As a first step, we invited officers
of our Canadian sister association, the Financial Management
Institute (FMI) to our PDC in San Diego last summer, Executive
Director Relmond VanDaniker and I attended a portion of FMI’s annual
conference last November, and several of our Canadian friends will
be with us again this year.
We also established a Task Force under
the leadership of Billy Morehead, Chair of our International
Development Committee, to research and prepare a report with
recommendations about how AGA should proceed. As with the early
careers task force report, the NEC will review this report this week
and we will share the results of that review in Nashville.
Last fall we held our Second Annual
National Performance Management Conference in Schaumberg, IL, which
represents one of the most exciting ways we are creating value for
you, our profession, and the American people. I believe that our two
financial and performance measurement and reporting programs—our
Certificate of Excellence in Accountability Reporting (CEAR) for
federal agencies, and our Certificate of Excellence in Service
Efforts and Accomplishments (SEA) Reporting for state and local
government entities—are a critical part of the future of AGA and our
profession. And we have increased the number of participants in both
of these programs, and the number of CEAR awards this year. These
two programs as well as the annual conference is making AGA and our
profession the leaders in improving and expanding
government performance measurement and reporting.
If accounting is
the language of business, then it is also a critical language of
government, especially if the numbers and words of this language are
presented in a way that effectively tells a story about the business
of government—a story that an average citizen can easily understand
and make decisions about how well their government is performing.
This concept is behind AGA’s new “Citizen Centric” reporting
program, and two cities, Saco, Maine and Portland, Oregon, as well
as the State of Oregon, each produced a 4-page citizen centric
report this year. Congratulations to them for being the leaders in
this important new program.
Another exciting way we found to
advance government accountability is becoming a national co-sponsor
of the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour (FWT) led by the Honorable David
Walker, Comptroller General of the United States. We want to help
draw attention to the simple fact that, according to analysts of
diverse political views, current fiscal policy is unsustainable and
hard choices must be made to set things right. I and other AGA
leaders have represented AGA at no fewer than five FWT stops around
the country.
Under our third AGA strategic value—Integrity—I
said that we would walk our talk and ensure that AGA was the best
possible role model for all the important things we stand for, and
we are doing just that. Obviously, financial and performance
measurement and reporting is one of those things. In that spirit,
this year, AGA will meet a reporting deadline similar to that of
federal agencies. That means we will complete our annual performance
and accountability report (PAR) within 45 days after the end of our
program year or August 15th. I have also asked our
National Office to apply those portions of our CEAR and SEA
performance reporting criteria that we believe apply to a nonprofit
organization like AGA. I have also asked that we have one of our SEA
review teams evaluate our next PAR after it is completed. I expect
we will benefit from the same thoughtful and valuable feedback that
we give to federal, state, and local governments that participate in
our performance reporting programs. I also think that this process
can be the first step toward demonstrating how similar criteria
might be developed and used to evaluate performance reports
developed by other nonprofit organizations, which I envision as a
huge new potential market and customer for AGA.
In that same
spirit, we established an NEC Governance Task Force, led by AGA
Treasurer and Past National President Tom Sadowski, which is, among
other things, developing a “financial and performance dashboard”.
This dashboard, just like the one in a car, will tell us at a glance
how AGA is progressing on our “trip”—our trip to creating
exceptional value for you. It will track AGA performance in
producing the outputs and outcomes that are most important to us,
and that will create or lead to exceptional value.
Continuing to walk our talk, AGA has
also developed its first ever “Citizen Centric Report to Our
Members” that will be unveiled in Nashville. We are very excited
about this new report for you, our members, and look forward to
receiving your input on it.
As for our fourth and final core
value--Leadership--I asked us to stretch ourselves,
each one of us, to find and be the leader each one of us was meant
to be, and many of you have done just that. I believe that each one
of us must step up to be the leaders in this country in advancing
government accountability in all its forms. And as leaders,
we each have an important responsibility. Your responsibility is to
become more knowledgeable about all the things that AGA stands for,
including financial and performance measurement and reporting, and
impress upon other government officials about how they can, and
why they should, do the right thing, including developing an SEA
and/or citizen centric report. I have been dogging the mayor of my
hometown, Denver, my state legislators, and our new governor to do
this. Not as AGA National President, but as a concerned citizen.
And I am confident that I will succeed. You too are a citizen of a
town and a state, and I hope you will do the same thing.
Why is this
your responsibility? Why is it important that you do
this? There are 88,000 governmental entities in the United States,
and public trust in government is low. You only have to watch
the TV news to know that. We need all governmental entities
reporting on their performance and improving the delivery of
government services to turn around the public’s perception. And
we can never expect any significant number of these entities to
begin this type of reporting without the active participation of our
members throughout the country--in each town and village and in
every state.
If you’ve been
reading this column, or if you’ve heard me speak before, I asked you
to do two things. First, if you don’t know much about performance
measurement and reporting or AGA’s new citizen centric program, I
asked you to learn more about them. Second, I asked you to commit to
at least one specific action you will take to get someone in your
federal agency to use the data in the Performance and Accountability
Report in making decisions, or get someone in your state or local
government to take the next step toward developing an SEA or citizen
centric report. If you do this, you can be proud that you did
something tangible toward building a more healthy and vibrant
democracy!
The Future
So what do I see
in my personal crystal ball for the future of AGA? We can all take
great pride in how AGA has grown in stature and influence over the
past half-century, and I know we will continue to do so. However, I
believe that the time is very near for AGA to update its vision and
mission statements, and yes, even its name, to formally recognize
and proclaim to the world the association we have become and were
always meant to be. The time is soon for us to begin to truly
fulfill our destiny.
We have come a
long way since that small group of federal government accountants
banded together in on September 14, 1950 to form the Federal
Government Accountants Association. However, the seeds of what
would become AGA were sown that day 57 years ago. At the time,
Robert W. King and his colleagues may not have consciously known the
exact path their fledgling association would follow. They may have
only intended to create a sense of community, a place where they
could gather to talk about issues of mutual professional and
personal interest. However, at a deeper level, I cannot help but
believe that they knew somewhere deep down that they were also
answering a higher calling; a calling to serve not just their
personal or parochial professional interests, but to serve the
broader needs of their profession, and ultimately the needs of the
government and those for whom they worked—the American people.
It is that higher
calling that has continued to guide AGA in its evolution to this
very day with the help of other leaders who carried the unspoken
vision to answer that higher calling. In 1971 it led us to invite
state and local accountants to join our ranks and to change our name
to AGA in 1975. It led other visionaries in 1994 to promote the
establishment of the CGFM to develop and recognize the unique
knowledge and skills of “government financial managers”. That
higher calling led other AGA leaders to develop our current vision
statement in 2003 to be “the premier association in advancing
government accountability”. It inspired other AGA leaders to
propose in 2003 that we change our name to the “Association for
Government Accountability” while still keeping our well-known
acronym, AGA. Last year, it also led AGA to form our separate
research arm, the Academy for Government Accountability. And that
higher calling also led other AGA leaders to, in Past National
President Jullin Renthrope’s words for his presidential theme, “take
accountability to the next level”, each in their own way.
AGA is now as
dedicated as much to serving our mission, as it is
serving our members. And this is of course how it
should be. As discussed earlier, AGA should always be a
member-driven association. At the same time, we have found some new
and exciting ways to advance government accountability that
serve our members at the very same time. And we are looking
at other opportunities, here at home as well as internationally,
continuing to look for other important ways we can fulfill our
mission.
So I believe we
should begin seriously considering taking yet another important step
along this path, the path toward the complete realization of our
destiny. It was that same higher calling that led the selection of
the theme for my year as your National President, Creating
Exceptional Value for Government Accountability Professionals.
It also inspired the AGA logic model, or as our Corporate Partner
Advisory Group Chair and NEC Member Hank Steininger coined it, the
AGA Value Proposition, as we pieced together all the
excellent initiatives that AGA was undertaking these days, along
with some ideas about the heretofore unspoken outcomes we were
trying to create and which I discussed earlier in this column. And
those that have seen the Value Proposition have all told us that
yes, this model accurately describes the current day AGA, the same
AGA that we were always destined to become.
It is our
responsibility to continue to answer that higher calling. And the
next step in that journey is to formally update our vision statement
and mission statement to align with the value proposition so that we
can fully free ourselves to become everything we were meant to be,
and to contribute everything we are capable of giving to our
profession, to our country, and to democracies everywhere.
Our current
mission statement focuses primarily on what we do in
AGA, the activities we perform—education,
professional development, certification, standards, and
research--rather than on the outcomes we intend to create,
what we are trying to accomplish. And by using words that
focus on what we do rather than what we are trying to create, those
words limit us. Make no mistake—these remain very worthwhile
activities and ones that I think we should and will continue to
conduct. However, I think we need to bring additional focus to that
part of our mission that is currently relegated to the tail end of
our mission statement—“…to advance government accountability….”--and
bring it up front and center where it belongs. I also believe that
we need to explicitly include the concept of “creating value” into
our mission statement. The specific words we choose to use in our
mission statement are critically important. They are important
because words stimulate thoughts, thoughts lead to deeds, and deeds
become our reality and our destiny. So we should carefully study
and discuss these words to ensure we create what we really want.
We need to
eventually change our vision and mission statements not only because
they consciously and subconsciously limit what we do and what we
will accomplish, but because they screen out people that might
otherwise join our association and help us in our quest to advance
government accountability. With 80 percent of our members being
baby boomers already beginning to retire, we must give prospective
(younger) members every reason to join AGA if we are to survive and
thrive. And many experts say that those joining the professional
workforce in recent years, those in their 20s, are seeking “meaning”
in their careers, in the same way many baby boomers were seeking
meaning, and at the same time they are asking, “What’s in it for
me?”. So creating value in AGA for them is critical.
At the risk of
being controversial, for the same reasons stated above, and for all
the reasons that Past National President Bill Anderson articulated
several years ago, I think we should, and eventually will, all agree
that the time has come to change our name without changing our
acronym (e.g., Association for Government Accountability).
Maybe not today, but soon.
So in the future, I see an AGA that
tapped into the dreams and aspirations of all its citizens for a
government, at all levels--federal, state, and local--that is fair
and equitable, just, efficient, and effective. An AGA that knows no
bounds in terms of what it could do to further its mission to
advance government accountability. In fact, I see an AGA that is
global in its reach, working as partners with similarly-minded
organizations in all the countries of the world, or setting up AGA
chapters or affiliates in those countries where AGA-like
organizations do not already exist. I think AGA has much to
contribute to enhancing strong financial management, transparency,
and accountability around the world, and thereby helping to build or
maintain healthy and vibrant democracies everywhere.
I see an AGA made
up, first and foremost, of highly educated, skilled, and experienced
professionals who have dedicated their professional lives to
becoming an expert in one or more of the various technical fields
that make up the government accountability profession. I also see
an AGA that embraces those in our citizenry that do not belong to
our profession, yet who share our popular and noble purpose of
advancing government accountability.
I see an AGA that
realized the power of numbers—the power beyond that in the numbers
we produce in financial statements, but the power in the number of
AGA members that join us in our shared quest for increased
government accountability. I see an AGA that includes, just for
starters, at least one member in each of this country’s 88 thousand
governmental units. That’s about a 6-fold increase in our current
membership. Surely there is at least one person in each of these 88
thousand government entities that is, or should be, dedicated to the
management of the entity’s finances, and belongs in AGA.
I see an AGA that,
in its understanding of this power in numbers, welcomes, and in
fact, encourages the participation of all our fellow citizens in the
furtherance of our mission of advancing government accountability.
I sometimes tell the story about how, in the course of a single
week, two “men/women on the street” types saw my AGA business card
and said, “Wow! Advancing government accountability! That sounds
like something I’d be interested in!” So yes, I see an AGA with a
new membership category—“Associate Member”, or something along those
lines. A non-voting category with perhaps a lower dues rate, or
even flexible rates with fewer benefits than “full members”. Yet a
category open to all citizens that share our passion for advancing
government accountability, and a source of additional influence and
revenue to further our worthwhile goals.
I don’t know if
now is the time to embark on what may be a controversial and
therefore probably difficult undertaking. However, I felt a need to
at least open the conversation.
Thank you for your continued
friendship. I have learned a lot from all of you. Thank you for
being my teachers. And thank you for joining me in getting excited
about AGA this year and the important work we all do for the
American people. I hope to see you in Nashville!
Let's Stay Excited!
Jeff Hart
AGA National President