Audit questions VA’s accountability system

In 2009, the Department of Veterans Affairs heralded a new era in government technology development. Its Project Management Accountability System (PMAS), it said, would deliver new capabilities in short sprints, allocate developmental resources to whatever projects are most pressing at the moment, and kill off projects that were spending money without delivering. Officials have credited the system with making sure more than 90 percent of its projects are on schedule.

Five years on, the department’s inspector general isn’t so sure VA has lived up to PMAS’ promises. In a nutshell, the auditors seem to feel that VA hasn’t committed the resources it needs to achieve its vision of wrestling its programs into a framework of accountability.

For example, the internal dashboard VA created so that it could track its IT development costs is short on reliable cost information, according to auditors. Ten out of the 19 jobs in the management office VA’s Office of Information and Technology created to oversee the agency’s compliance with the PMAS system are vacant. And many of the periodic oversight reviews of development programs that that were supposed to be a key facet of PMAS don’t appear to be happening.

Two OI&T offices in particular weren’t living up to their oversight responsibilities, auditors said. The Office of Product Development, which is supposed to bring senior leader visibility into the planning phases of new IT projects, was required to conduct planning reviews on 16 projects over the past year. It only did three. And the Enterprise Risk Management Office, charged with overseeing compliance with the PMAS system completed just three out of 10 reviews it should have conducted.

“As a result, VA’s portfolio of IT development projects, budgeted at approximately $495 million in fiscal year 2014, were potentially being managed at an unnecessarily high risk,” the OIG wrote. “In addition, OI&T and VA leaders lacked reasonable assurance that development projects were delivering promised functionality on time and within budget, which makes them more susceptible to cost overruns and schedule slippages.”

The OIG’s findings seem to undercut VA’s assertions over the last five years that it is requiring programs to produce results or else be killed off. By the book, PMAS demands that programs be looked at every 60 days to decide whether it’s time to take new ideas out of the planning stage and into active development or whether they should be canceled altogether. But in 81 percent of the cases the OIG examined, those reviews never took place.

A program designed to monitor suicide risk among medical patients stayed in the planning phase for 260 days without receiving a single review. Another, intended to help process claims for the caregivers of newborn children was in planning for 315 days without attention from overseers.

The audit also concluded that the PMAS program as a whole doesn’t have the staffing resources to meet its own objectives. VA has filled some of the gaps by hiring contract support, but the OIG calculated VA could have saved $6.4 million by beefing up its civil service ranks to do the work.

Stephen Warren, VA’s chief information officer and acting executive in charge of OI&T, concurred with most of the IG’s recommendations, including that the PMAS offices conduct their reviews on schedule and improve the reliability of cost information in the dashboard.

But he disagreed with a recommendation to cut back on contract support. In a written response to the report, he said a recent restructuring of the PMAS office reduced the number of full time positions to 13. All but two are now filled, and VA hopes to fill them soon. In the meantime though, the PMAS oversight program’s workload is increasing, he said, so it will need to continue to rely on contractors for work the department deems non-inherently governmental.

Copyright © 2024 Federal News Network. All rights reserved. This website is not intended for users located within the European Economic Area.