break you will see members straggling back shortly i have a short series of questions for you and they really have to do with the work that the rat board has been doing as far as we can tell and both myself the former chairman and the current ranking member have all gone over reviewed it seen some of the discoveries but particularly what we see is the first time in which there has been a direct outreach  we can tell has no comprehensive plan to bring a similar recipient reporting system across the government can you comment on that mister werfel yes first of all i would say that we are completely committed to carrying forward some of the important accomplishments that the recovery board has had one of the major areas where they have been successful as you have noted is the deployment of a forensic data tool and a fraud detection tool it is for that reason that the presidents budget includes a proposal to move into the department of treasury chairman issa you are talking about the ten dollars million mister werfel the ten dollars million for the do not pay solution which would adopt very similar approaches that the recovery board has adopted in terms of having a central place where the treasury department in this case would be assisting agencies and looking across all data sources where we can get that ten dollars million investment would be able to guarantee that it would have access subject to data integrity and ability to transmit it to do the kind of work the rat board has done as you know the ra leveraged basically katrina rita data they leveraged existing one time events in order to get more access they have been unable except anecdotally by transfers that they have been able to get have been unable to get the real access that would allow cross platform and treasury certainly would have the authority and the confidence are you prepared to either legislatively or through executive action get that kind of buy in or will work by sunday morning that is my question to you because your teeth are not sharp enough to cut through the bureaucracy are you asking for something that would give either you andor in this case treasury the teeth to make this a werfel i think the answer to that is yes we have to balance as we break down data silos that exist in government today and create the enable us to do the type of analytics that are going to drive more powerful assessments around finding anomalies fraud and error there will be other public policy balances that need to come into place including for example privacy and other implications and data security it is my position that we can achieve a far have which you are prohibited from accessing for purposes of analysis mister werfel for purposes of well there are for example one of the more protected data bases is the irs data base as an example and to the extent th personally identifiable information or tax information section six thousand one hundred and three of the code would prevent that type of movement of data another great example is the national directory of new hires chairman issa right but lets go through because the irs is the best known by the american people  the irs routinely takes information in digests it and responds to state laws federal and state laws if you have a deadbeat data in minnesota who leaves and goes to florida or any other state the minnesota input data leads to an output data that confirms the availability of the dollars allows for the grabbing of the tax return and thus the movement of it either to public entities that have taken care of the mother and child or directly to the individual or for that matter even to a state coffer on a state tax so if you have that authority within the code cant you without looking at it create a leverage where you send the data in a format the irs can absorb with your request and you get back only the limited you didnt say that you would ask the president by executive order you apparently historically do not have the legislative authority are you going to come to us for legislative authority and if so when mister werfel i think let me step back and say that there are different avenues we can dig to break down these data silos in some case administrative and in some case we would need legislation i believe we are in a as we move forward on our efforts to detect fraud and understand more what we need to do to knock down these data silos i think we will be back and asking you for help legislative help to create these types of data transfers i dont have a date certain by which i know we will come back but it is our commitment to mastercard or any of the other if you will world class organizations real time online assessment is how you prevent the loss not how you simply see if the courts are too backed up to go after the person once you find them ten million is obviously not for that do you have a plan to make any portion of the government as proactive as visa mastercard mister werfel i dont know that i could articulate for you an overarching plan i will say that i agree with the principle that prevention comes first versus paying and chasing errors after they occur absolutely there are situations that are emerging today where agencies are taking more aggressive steps to pause to review to place moratoriums on certain payments before they go out the door that is part of the prevention but a global cross government plan that initiates the type of neural networks that you talking about we dont have that in place yet i think if we get to a point where we start to knock down some of these data silos that will open the door we need to bring some smart people around the table to figure out how to  opportunity to respond to those issues first of all i think it is a very important thing that the sunlight foundation is doing by raising these issues to our attention it is part of transparency at work we dont just self identify errors we rely on the public to be reviewing our reports and finding those issues as well i think in some cases we are going to find that the public is going to report like a group like sunlight foundation an error and it is going to have a real immediate impact and be a legitimate issue for us to address and sometimes the error has an easy explanation and it is not really an error at all i think there was an example that was provided around the school lunch program where usaspending gov doesnt require us to report payments under twenty five thousand dollars which is the bulk of the school lunch payments that is why there is an absence of information all that said there are criticisms that were discussed in the first panel that are valid and we are not where we need to be in terms of the full completeness of the data we have issued a policy at omb that we think is having an impact on this that requires federal agencies to initiate more robust quality assurance programs around the completeness accuracy and timeliness of their data starting with the senior accountable official and moving forward to the types of frameworks we see in our traditional financial statement reporting process risk management internal control review reconciliation of information in our accounting systems to what is being reported on usaspending gov all of that is underway but congressman it is an evolving process as we move forward there will continue to be points in about how folks on wall street were moving so fast and coming up with all kinds of new products in some instances so fast it was hard for that there are moments that i see in my work where it is almost astonishing the progress that is being made so for example i look at recovery gov today as an example the information that is there the level of detail the functionality of that website and i think that that is really a cutting edge tool that is probably far ahead of where i thought we might be five years ago if i was testifying before you then and so that is exciting and that i think rallies the rest of the community around what is possible and really opens the door to even greater efforts at the same time there are agencies that i could probably say i would have thought would have been further along if i was testifying here five years ago to answer your question i think a bigger hammer is needed i think what you have today is a dichotomy that was reported on the first panel that is accurate we have  what i would argue is a very robust financial statement audit process that exists today started in one thousand nine hundred and ninety it has been twenty years we have twenty of the twenty four major agencies in government receiving a clean audit opinion a lot of effort goes into scrutinizing to the tenth decimal point the numbers that go on our balance sheets and our other basic financial statements and we have developed a very robust process in response that is moving forward and  achieving important things in terms of financial reporting reliability that robustness does not exist with respect to the information as reported on usaspending gov the spend information as we call it is not completely wired into the financial statement audit process we think that we need to look at that audit process and that reporting model to potentially realign some of that audit scrutiny around spending information i think you would see a difference in results if agencies felt act two hundred thousand prime and sub recipients file public quarterly reports with up to ninety nine distinct data fields as you point out this is more frequent than other major financial reporting required by the federal government and yet in time where there was tremendous accountability both vertically and horizontally across government and recipients about getting the information reported in and getting it correct there was leadership am glad of it a real healthy stress that was placed on the entire federal environment and the recipients of the recovery act that this needed to be done transparently and it became one of the most major priorities that i have ever been involved in in order to make this work make it successful and we had a very talented individual in earl devaney at the board at the recovery board helping us along the way  o congressional or administration leadership around getting those data requirements up and running when this administration came in it was confronted almost immediately with  the economic situation and the recovery act we immediately looked at this as a major opportunity to deploy recovery act reporting and recovery gov successfully and have it set the milestone that usaspending gov would need to follow we already see evidence that that is following through because up until the recovery act we never had any sub award reporting in usaspending gov and now we do so we are already starting to see that this  how do you we have confronted ourselves the following question how do we drive more accountability for federal agencies reporting of spending information into usaspending gov we feel like we have developed a pretty strong muscle in the area of basic financial statement reporting the agencies have been doing it for years they have set up it systems and processes to do it so the question is how do we walk in that game and talk in that dialogue that si where the concept of the statement of spending came because agencies have the ability and the experience and auditors have the ability and experience to audit basic financial statements we felt that if we can create a financial statement similar to our other statements that has the foundational information that goes into usaspending gov that you in order to get a clean audit opinion on that statement of spend it would automatically mean that the underlying source information is accurate what we believe has been a successful yet still emerging initiative to improve basic financial reporting on things like balance sheets mister connolly are there best practices from  when we started this process of moving forward on a more robust quality assurance program from usaspending gov is we asked each agency to submit a data quality plan and you can look across those plans and see some agencies really ahead of the game in terms of the types of reconciliations that they are doing looking at control totals doing automated reports right out of their systems i think danny harris doctor harris did a very good job during his testimony of explaining how together the reports separately and therefore it is not as efficient and it is not as reliable so one of the basic missions of my office the cfo counsel is to share this information across agencies we have working groups that are doing that to say here is what doctor harris and the department of education are doing they have it wired into a process that is working for them and minimizing errors and your agency is not doing as well of a job so how can we close that gap so that is part of the real live spending item by any other name we just dont like to talk about it but it is a trillion dollars a year what is omb doing to try to make sure that we are shedding more light on tax expenditures and their relationship to the federal deficit and their relationship to other aspects of the required elements for example within recovery act reporting and usaspending gov so sometimes we are so busy dealing with the statutory requirements that are before us and meeting all those deadlines that some of the other elements of transparen y dont get on our radar screen as much for me that is true my days and nights are spent meeting the requirements of the various laws before me so let me if i could consult with irs and then come back and brief transparency and we are going to have data available to the public tax expenditures if you look at how they are accounted and how we address them in budget documents and so forth it is woefully inadequate and it is a very substantial amount of opportunity cost from a revenue point of view it may be all good policy but it deserves the light of day so i would welcome your coming back to us in much more detail and let me ask  run through a litany of questions here and just short answers and try to run through a couple of things on it as we finish this out thank you for waiting through the lunch hour to be able to be here as well as we were finishing up the voting you had mentioned earlier that there was a need for some legislation to correct some of the  needs that are out there i would like for your office to be able to provide to our committee that list that you would say here are the legislative fixes that we need to be able to help resolve those things if you could get that back to us we will make sure that we share that in a bipartisan way and that would be very helpful to us there are a maze of sites that are out there recovery gov was very well done it got the information out quickly it was so successful that now we have multiplied the dot gov go find their information now we have moved from it is out there go search for it when originally the design was lets lock in a data gov usaspending gov and say if you are looking for something go there is that still the mission if so how is trying and i think making important progress in getting more real information and other types of reports public in particular through the web another challenge and there are numerous but the other challenge is sometimes the quantity of the data that is out there can be overwhelming and how are we assisting the citizenry in accessing that information and right now i think you have hit on something that is part of a strategy it might not be the most effective strategy evolving but it is the branding of our websites in ways that make sense if you want to learn about grants go to grants gov if you want to learn about where federal dollars are going usaspending gov if you are curious about the recovery act not going to order you one way or the other on this but let me ask you to examine that because people outside of the beltway do not know where to go they do not know if they are looking for food stamp information to go to the agriculture department they are not aware that there are education programs in the department of defense they dont know how to be able to search for those things so they need a central portal to go be able to ask the questions if they are going to get the data then it can take them to the spot it is going to go it doesnt have to be all in one place it can be these various sites it does make sense there are going to some watchdog groups that are always going to land on research gov that is what they research that is what they want to go after or the grants gov but there has to be a place for people to be able to go to if the information is out there that they know otherwise many  the point that we are working toward that objective we have as you mentioned some success with the branding in terms of certain stakeholders who automatically know where to go and we develop important partnerships with them and that efforts are underway to reconcile the from agriculture and education that some data standards if things are going to go up here is how they need to go up and i gave the example earlier of an address field that includes the entire address including state city zip code in one field that is obviously not s e a single entity that is a contractor needs to have an i d number that someone can search for that contractor and they can chase them down there is a need for omb to be able to provide that to the agencies here are more data standards even begging the question what is a significant piece of data out there and the for instance on that if someone is going and looking for how many employees does an agency have what is their budget what are the programs that they are doing and what is the mission of those programs there is no place they can go to get that they are stuck searching through an agency website that may or may not have that that seems to be fairly usable data that i think most american taxpayers would want to be able to look at a site like a data gov like something whatever it may be and to say how many people work there what is the mission of the departments that are there what are even the names of the departments that are there and what is the budget for that to find an established piece on that if that is something omb can begin on that is something i think we should begin on as well to say there is a basic transparency piece that needs to get will see some pockets of standardization that are promising and that we can build upon but what you will also find is a lot of work to be done we need to move out on a strategic set of priorities we have started lessons learned what are we missing what are people asking for let me give you a for instance on it it would be a help to this committee that when the emails come back as feedback and there are several of your sites that say for feedback or contact us for more questions what data are you looking for basically if our committee were to get those things in real time at the same time not that we are going to respond to those things but hat would allow us in our oversight role to be able to say you know what these are the data pieces people are asking for and if our committee could get that unfiltered and it could be shared bipartisan then people could get a chance to say you know what a lot of people seem to be asking for this why is it that we dont provide that that would allow us to do our oversight a lot stronger and let me make another comment to you you mentioned recovery gov that is a very successful site you are right it was very well done and the information was unprecedented that was put out my feeling on it is one of the successes of it was the recipients were uploading information it wasnt just a government entity that was putting it down there they have lots of other things but the recipients are many many a lot of the information that the federal government reports today the source is the recipient of the federal dollars reporting what is going on with the dollars from a financial perspective a performance perspective what was i think unique about the recovery act was the automated nature of it the speed of it all of that mister lankford correct that is a platform that now exists though what i am asking is is that a platform that will continue to be used will it be replicated in other areas to say the recipient can quickly say have received this grant and also be able to come back and say this is what was done with it because one of the primary questions that i get a lot about grants and contracts and other things was it actually accomplished did we do it what happened with that i think there would be people that could look around their own neighborhood and could find this is what happened in my area i had no idea that the federal government was involved in this area in positive ways but they dont know unless there is some reporting back on accountability on that so that recovery gov platform of recipient reporting is that something that is going to be multiplied the agencies to get that information correctly whether it be a data field that is not done or the dollar amounts are completely left out is there a chain of command is there someone verifying that and saying hey we have to get this correct it seems that thirty some odd percent accuracy rate is not quite h werfel a couple of responses there first as mentioned earlier in my testimony and mentioned on the first panel right now the process is a self assessment we have asked the agencies to create a senior accountable official and then an internal process to validate completeness and accuracy and there are some limitations in the self assessment an independent eye whether it is the inspector general or an auditor coming in to review that is going to drive improvements and more objectivity and the results will improve secondly i want to just on the record take a different perspective on the thirty percent success rate that was in dont know if we bought two dollars million worth of peanut butter in oklahoma or not from a government contract but there just seem to be some issues that i can look at and i can say okay somebody needs to be verifying this data and making sure it is complete and there needs to be a process it is a very good thing to get data out there but to get it out wrong or incomplete raises all sorts of questions mister werfel absolutely and as i think was evidenced during the first panel some of the criticisms or concerns about the data have rational explanations and some of them it is just a basic data quality issue that we need to address i think the more people that are searching this data and using this data the more we move in the celebrate that leverage it make sure that we do have a more accountable government but as you point out there are gaps in the reporting and we are working on closing them mister lankford that is the best gift that we can give is transparency watchdog groups outside citizen groups the contractors that it may be a good thing to celebrate the fact that we can now solve the peanut butter mystery but on the other hand we may want more information and i would because it is not intuitively obvious to the searcher why we would be spending two dollars million tax dollars on peanut butter so while we are celebrating the fact that one can access that piece of data i would hope that to the chairmans point that we try to on it but i think it is these broad categories to know that it is consistent we know what that is the information is getting out there it is trackable it is traceable for instance if a report is done people want to know if there is a report done on wildfires in a certain bird nest it asks the obvious question how much did that cost to do that report well we know there was a grant that was given to be able to do that we should be attaching that report to the cost of producing that report so everyone could know and evaluate is that good use of taxpayer dollars and instruct the conversation that is a good thing for us as legislators to be able to look at and be able to see and for people in our districts to hold us to account on that that is a good thing for us to hold you to account to say we need that information to get out there for reports done how much does it cost can they find it and be able to track it is a reasonable thing if there are no additional questions mister werfel thank you very much for being here we have a great deal to do we look forward to your follow up reports on it and this