Pentagon leads federal agencies in failure to adequately disclose expenditures

The Defense Department has not devoted the resources to adequately account for its spending as required by the bipartisan 2014 Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act). The Trump administration has made compliance a priority, but the Pentagon’s inspector general said, “Specifically, for the second quarter of fiscal 2017, the [Defense] comptroller did not certify and submit complete award data, timely award data, accurate financial and award data, and quality financial and award data for publication on USASpending.gov.”  (Government Executive, November 10. 2017, by Charles S. Clark)

The Government Accountability Office also released a report on compliance of federal agencies with the DATA Act finding that there were widespread failures to comply with the act. Many attribute the failings to “growing pains” as the agencies are new to the transparency mandate. The Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Defense and State departments were cited for their omissions.  (FCW, November 9, 2017, by Chase Gunter)

Matt Rumsey of the Sunlight Foundation, November 10, 2017, said that given the difficulty of the task, he was not dismayed to see these early results and in fact saw “meaningful progress.”