will come to order the oversight committee exists to secure two fundamental principles first americans have a right to know that the money washington takes from them is well spent and second americans deserve an efficient effective government that works for them our duty on the oversight and government reform committee is to protect these rights our solemn responsibility is to hold government accountable to taxpayers because taxpayers have a right to know what they get from their government we will work tirelessly in partnership with citizen watchdogs to deliver the facts to the american people and bring genuine reform to the federal bureaucracy and today's hearing more than any other hearing of this year is in fact about delivering on that promise something that both parties and the american people know need to happen we need to create more transparency more accountability in government this week there is a bipartisan consensus forming over a new way forward in spending transparency in recent months i have had numerous conversations with republicans and democrats with senate and white house officials about how we can fix this broken program data transparency and the bill that i introduced yesterday the data act to establish an independent body to track federal spending including grants contracts loans and agencies internal expenses on a single platform with a consistent reporting standard vice president biden also announced the administration's intent to support bipartisan reform efforts to achieve digital accountability let me make something clear there is no difference in what the vice president wants to accomplish and what i want to accomplish and i believe we'll hear today what chairman devaney wants to accomplish there are differences in how we get from where we are with a labyrinth of failed or partially successful programs to one single accountability that is less burdensome and more effective for all the participants and for the american people in a gallup poll released last month the vast majority of americans blamed the problems in government on too much spending for unneeded or wasteful federal programs seventythreehpercent of american adults are convinced that spending is the problem in washington and i'm part of that hpercent in fact if american taxpayers knew the whole truth about federal spending the number would be much higher than hpercent let us rest assured that when we get full accountability when we reduce waste in government we still will have a spending problem however currently se among many others to manage multiple databases and hope each of them gets better is to assume that the tried and true failures of the past will be the tried and true successes of the future and while i oppose the president's trilliondollar stimulus both in my vote and in my rhetoric i continue to believe that chairman devaney and the efforts he has put into affordable trial technology is in fact the way forward and revolutionary accountability and transparency can be achieved on building on top of a model that this committee asked for as part of our role in that stimulus and in fact the rat board has implemented let us not make any mistakes there have been errors and there have been failures that had to be corrected and yes of course often the figures were figures no one wanted to  the cost of retaining a job might be artificially higher than we thought it was going to be but the facts are the facts and many of those high costs were real while many needed adjustment and chairman devaney got right on that and we have a record of mistakes that were made being corrected but ultimately a single reporting system over time can become more reliable than states and localities having to report to multiple agencies in different ways today we will hear from chairman devaney and other advocates of transparency through technology and although our first and most important witness today will be chairman devaney i want to know note that on the second panel we will have individuals who will talk about the burden that reporting gives them and they will talk about it because ultimately our goal of a single transparent system is to reduce the burden one system throughout government means you only have to learn it once multiple systems today mean that anyone who is accountable for more than one report and most entities are have to learn multiple systems we want to end that today on a bipartisan bicameral and in this case bibranches of government and with that i yield to the ranking member mister cummings i want to thank the chairman for calling this hearing and i and very distinguished years you said something when you first appeared before us when you got this new assignment and i will never forget it as long as i live you said you know i want to make sure the mechanisms are put in place so that peopleh so that we prevent them from doing the wrong things and i thought that that was such i said to myself that makes sense and thank you for doing that congress created the board as part of the recovery act in two thousand and nine to put in place some of the strongest transparency and accountability measures ever enacted as a result the ability to track federal spending has improved by leaps and bounds in addition to promoting job creation economic activity and longterm growth the recovery act fostered unprecedented accountability and transparency in government spending under the administration's implementation and chairman devaney's oversight the recovery has had historically low levels of waste fraud and abuse today more than hpercent of recovery funds have been awarded and less than half of hpercent currently have open investigations i look forward to hearing more from him on the board's successes lessons learned and best practices that could be applied elsewhere in government i would also like to commend president obama for his unprecedented efforts to increase transparency and accountability in government spending yesterday the president si executive order that takes the model work of the board and extends it across the federal government the president's executive order establishes a new government accountability and transparency board to provide strategic direction for enhancing federal spending transparency and eliminating waste fraud and abuse in federal programs the president directed the board to report on guidelines to integrate systems that collect government spending data improve reliability and capitalize on the proven success of frauddetection technologies the executive order also directed the vice president to convene cabinetlevel meetings on agency efforts to make government work better faster and more efficiently under the white house accountable government initiative we have also seen remarkable improvements in other federal transparency efforts over the past several years websites like usaspending gov recovery gov and the it dashboard have put more information on line than ever before about how federal dollars are being spent i applaud the president for continuing to advance the goals of transparency and accountability in government unfortunately budget cuts may force the white house to scale back plans for some of those very websites i just mentioned at risk i noted a number of transparency advocates and good government groups have criticized these cuts including some of our witnesses here today i look forward to hearing more from them on the be a partisan issue and i know you agree with that but protecting taxpayers hardearned money from waste fraud and abuse is one of the most important issues that we deal with on this committee i want to acknowledge the legislation you've introduc standards and i supported those efforts in addition to your bill every member on this side of the aisle joined together in march to introduce h r h the transparency and openness in government act a comprehensive compilation of five component pieces of legislation that passed the house last congress with broad bipartisan support including your own since we introduced this legislation seventeen organizations supporting transparency and openness in government model perhaps not only for tomorrow but for generations yet unborn i look forward to reviewing your proposal and to working together on these issues mister chairman and i yield back chairman issa i thank the gentleman let the record indicate mr hdevaney answered in the affirmative chairman i won't even give you the introduction you know the drill as well as anyone you've been her many times if you go over no one is going to call the whistle on you  because in fact we're here to hear what you have to say with that you're recognized mister devaney thank you mister chairman ranking member cummings for those kind remarks and members of the committee i want to thank for the opportunity to appear before you today to share with you some of the recovery board's lessons learned i will be glad to answer any questions you have after i finish my opening remarks mister chairman i have given considerable thought to lessons learned from what i sincerely hope will be my last government assignment what i would like to do today is to share with the committee ten very specifics lessons learned that i feel could be incorporated into the way our government does business going forward the first lessons learned is nothing motivates bureaucrats to act faster than a law with concrete deadlines the longstanding culture of federal agencies has been to take the path of least resistance and to take the longest time allowed to enact any change i have found that agencies continually underestimate their capacities to get things done pursuing pilot after pilot with few longlasting developments in fact there are so many ongoing pilots that i sometimes think of our government as a giant airline the recovery act addresses this problem head on requiring recipients to a can be collected directly from recipients with a high degree of accuracy in the past data entry about federal spending was done solely by agency employees the recovery act in its mandated recipient reporting changed that dynamic proving that recipients of federal funding could report just as accurately any future legislation should recognize this potential cost savings and call for the migration of all spending reporting from agencies to recipients the third lesson learned is that this spending data can be quickly quality controlled displayed and uniquely arrayed to achieve unprecedented levels of transparency in the past agencies in receipt of recipientreported data would have spent excessive amounts of time scrubbing that data in the basements of buildings all over this town prior to releasing it by the time of its release the information would be outdated and meaningless the recovery act required realtime reporting with results understandable for all users the fourth lesson is that the federal government desperately needs a uniform governmentwide alphanumeric numbering system for all awards currently each agency uses its own unique numbering system for contracts and grants as we found during the recovery transparency process these disparate award numbers make tracking federal spending unnecessarily arduous and complicated every quarter there are mismatches when we try to align recipient reported award numbers on federalreporting gov to what the agencies have reported to omb in our efforts to see who did and who did not report as required the award id numbering process must be simplified  standardized perhaps akin to the credit card numbering system that we are all accustomed to fifth lesson is that new technology particularly cloud computing can play a critical role in the delivery and effectiveness of transparency and accountability in aprilhof two thousand and ten the board made the move to a cloud computing infrastructure for recovery gov a groundbreaking event that allowed for more efficient computer operations and reduced cost payasyougo approach to information technology permitting lower initial investments to start operations it is also flexible enough to allow it staff to add or subtract computing capacity as needs dictate rooting out redundancies and inefficiencies this condensing of systems could create an enormous savings to the american taxpayer the sixth lesson learned is that transparency can cause embarrassment which in turn causes selfcorrecting behavior in february two thousand and ten we began publishing on recovery gov a list of noncompliers a list of shame if you will that states the names of recipients who have failed to report as required users can see who the repeat offenders are i'm happy to report that in the first quarter of two thousand and eleven the number of time nonreporters is down to seventeen and the number of time nonreporters is down to seven this is out of over two hundred thousand awards reported for the quarter but perhaps the most important lesson learned is that transparency is a force multiplier that drives accountability it has become abundantly clear to me that transparency is a friend of the enforcer and the enemy of the fraudster with lessh with more than hpercent of the recovery monies having been awarded less than half a percent of all reported recovery contracts grants and loans currently have open investigations after  prove it but i believe that it is largely due to the transparency embedded in the recovery act number eight is that the goalh if the goal is prevention instead of merely detection a igs both have a high degree of incentive to collaborate together the board strategy was to focus our efforts heavily on preventing fraud from occurring in the first place not just detecting it after the fact that is why the ig community has provided training for more than one hundred and thirty thousand people since februaryh my observation has been that when the goal is fraud detection igs come to the table with a great deal of enthusiasm while agencies seem less motivated in overseeing these recovery funds the board has learned that when the common goal is fraud prevention agencies and igs are equally enthusiastic and a remarkable collaborative effort takes place between the two the ninth lesson learned is that the most valuable accountability module is one that provides equal access to both agencies and enforcers the new analytical tools and methodologies developed in our recovery operations center have proven to be as valuable to the agencies as they have been to the igs i believe that a single repository for this accountability data rather than mini recoverylike centers sprinkled around the federal government would be a better idea and present a significant cost savings to the american taxpayer finally there is the lesson that articulating success for prevention is a lot harder to do than for detection fortyonehyears ago i began my federal career as a secret service agent learning how to protect our nation's leaders how do you measure success in that role certainly failure is easy enough to see but how does one measure the real effect on a potential assassin that the secret service presence has now towards the end of my government career i admit i am still pondering the difficulties of measuring success preventing fraud or waste how can we know how much fraud has been prevented by what the board and ig community did during the recovery program high fraud losses accompanied by frontpage stories and nightly news segments would have clearly signaled failure extremely low levels of fraud mister chairman i have recently written a white paper reflecting the board's successes and some of the lessons learned i have talked about here today more importantly this paper also lays out a template for how those lessons could possibly be embedded world the first person to ask questions would probably be mr htowns who if not for his chairmanship the embedded role that you played wouldn't have been in the law so i want to take an opportunity to thank him because it was  fact his leadership that caused the kind of accountability you have an opportunity to show us with that i'm going to waive going first and recognize the gentleman from tennessee  thank you mister chairman and thank you chairman devaney for sharing those thoughts and wisdoms with us i would like to start and ask you what some of the key differences between tracking spending using recipient reporting reporting is as accurate or more accurate than agency reporting i think when recipients report directly they have a parochial interest in getting it right we built into our systems opportunities for checks and balances for agencies and recipients to think about what they've reported and change it if they had to all those changes are totally auditable so we know what was changed and when it was changed and we have a continuous open environment for people to change things sometimes quarters after they've made a mistake and our perspective is that citizens do come back recipients do come back and change thanks because they simply don't want to be embarrassed everybody gets to see what they put in  beenh i don't think i would have imagined that when we first started but it's been a great lesson mister desjarlais do you believe that a permanent universal recipient reporting requirement is necessary to achieve transparency spend their time on accountability to get it right mister desjarlais you're talking about some of the successes earlier can you please address the number of recipients who fail to report and explain how the board has managed to keep it so small mister devaney well when we first the first reporting period there were a lot of people that failed the report and i take that to be a manifestation of a new system a new idea and people just not understanding several quarters later those numbers were down dramatically and now as i mentioned earlier the amount of recipients that actually haven't reported two or more times is rather low and three or more times is down to seven and that's out of hundreds of thousands of awards so you know it's  hpercent which is i think good mister desjarlais do you believe that if congress instituted a board that tracks spending on a larger level and not just stimulus spending that the rate of failure to report would explain how this would simplify the tracking of federal spending mister devaney well it became very obvious to us early on that that every single agency has their own unique numbering system probably some dating back to george washington so it was  almost impossible for us to collect data from all of those various agencies so we had to design our own datacollection site and then we have to every time the reporting takes place we have to deal with what we call mismatches the numbers from what the recipients report to us differ from the numbers that the agencies tell us that they gave the money out so it's a constant battle of trying to reduce those mismatches it is very thank very much let me begin by saying to you mr hdevaney thank you for the outstanding job that you are doing and of course i remember you saying that transparency is harder to practice than it is to talk about and of course i recognize that you talked about the fact that embarrassing you know sometimes it brings about change in behavior what are the complaints that you getting from the ones that did not cooperate are they saying they did not have the resources to do what you're asking what are they complaining about those few that did not comply mister devaney well the excuses were all over the board sir they ranged from the ridiculous to those that quite frankly probably involve some hardships for instance we had early on some tribes and some other recipients who simply didn't have internet and couldn't comply that way so we had to devise a system so they could get their reports in as well i think the list of shame that we publish every quarter has worked well in getting those numbers down we're down to seven some of those folks have filed lawsuits against the government for the audacity of the government asking them to report about what they did with the money that the government gave them so  i do i do i think the enforcement piece that's in the bill will be very helpful i think that there are some as i read the bill last night there are some civil remedies it doesn't preclude any criminal remedies  but that's something that usually motivates people to comply with the law and lacking that enforcement mechanism in the recovery act i think some people took advantage of that mister towns all right let me just say to the chairman ever feel as though you needed that authority to appropriately achieve your mission mister devaney i never personally have felt that way i've been very fortunate to have in my federal career rather  sizable numbers of investigators and we work very closely with the department of justice and always use the grand jury subpoena power so i've never felt that way i think there are some igs who do feel that way that it and i respect their views i have stated before publicly that i've never used it and don't feel like i would mister cummings would you support legislative efforts to establish a permanent board modeled on the r doesn't matter to me i've never used it it's in the recovery act so i'm very anxious to see legislation creating a board that would do this very thing and it would be up to the members of the board to use it or used in other words have any of your people working for you ever said you know we could compel testimony if you're not willing to give it voluntarily do you know whether that's ever occurred on your watch now or in the past when you have had it mister devaney i don't think so numbering system maybe it's just my simple way but things like that just drive me crazy that seems like something that could happen within an hour or two okay maybe a week what is holding backh who responsibility is this to do that mister devaney well of course each agency as i mentioned earlier has developed these systems over numbers of years thirty hyears so they have their own unique numbering systems it means a lot  them they are very reluctant to give it up they would argue the agencies would argue that it might cost a lot of money to retrofit their systems to adapt to a new numbering system i think going forward we would like to do a feasibility study to see exactly what that problem is whether it's as big as they think it is and try and convince the agencies and omb that this is an issue that's way past its time  some agencies are going to be outliers and are going to have to retrofit their systems to adapt to a new numbering system i just don't think this is as big a problem as people try to make it out to be mister chaffetz the sunlight foundation's been  very good at clarifying and bringing some things out this statistic they threw out though is quite stunning sunlight three hundred and twenty five programs had no reported information for all of fiscal year two thousand and eight also stating that usaspending gov reported accurate information for only hpercent of federal programs do you find that to be true and how do we solve that mister devaney well i can only speak for our site and i think our site is extraordinarily accurate i know that usaspending has had problems from the very beginning i think the day they launched they were talking about hpercent error rate so they make a good effort and i think they've improved but  i think as long as they depend on the agencies to send them information that's been scrubbed and changed and  penalties are very helpful i think the single alphanumeric numbering system would be helpful i think migration from recipient reporting to agency reporting would be extraordinarily helpful and i think layer of oversight what's your understanding of what that would do and how it would relate to the current structure you head up mister devaney well my impression of the legislation is it is meant to  replace as you probably know the recovery board sunsets in two thousand and thirteen so i'm assuming that if the legislation were to pass earlier than that it would replace the board that i chair but i connolly how well do you think the work you've done has gone mister devaney i think it has gone very well there have been as noted earlier some mistakes along the way but i think we've been able to correct those  right away and i think we've brought transparency and accountability to this money it's a huge amount of money there are low levels of fraud i happen to think the transparency is the principal cause of that and i think when you put transparency and accountability together you get a great combination we've also used new tools we've created what we call a recovery operations center which has used  sophisticated analytical tools that heretofore have been used principally in the intelligence and law enforcement sectors and the novelty of what we've done is that those tools are now being used on government spending and the result has been quite quite  remarkable it turns out that when you use those tools and when you put together a good competent analyst you can actually interrupt fraud and prevent fraud from happening in the first instance  model i mean this model is unique is it not i mean you were in the sense an experimental model a new paradigm for transparency and oversight mister devaney i think that's true i think we were an experiment  think if you talk about proof of concept i think we've done it and that's why i think this legislation makes an awful lot of sense i also think that vice president'sh the president's executive order yesterday makes sense as well no but my sense is that the individual igs in those agencies do that job but we don't as a board take that on mister connolly you talked a little bit in your testimony i think about cloud computing and how it could actually lead of that equipment that we had into other areas so there is a savings the other thing i would say about cloud computing is it allows you to be more flexible and to expand almost like an accordion if you need to do more you can do more readily you don't have to go out and buy more equipment rent space and hire more people so it's a technology that i think its time has come and i think the government ought to move there we were the first government enterprise got do you believe the private sector can do this more efficiently maybe than we can in the public sector mister devaney oh i don't know i think they certainly have been a leader there but i think the government is slowly recognizing that we ought to be there you said that what the vice president is proposing and you and i have both had meetings with the vice president you approve of the president's executive order you approve of i appreciate that you like all or most of what's in our our legislation now how do you envision that we get from the president's executive order which if i understand it correctly is a study to do x over the next hmonths our legislation which is intended to be pushed toward a particular set of goals with some specificity vice president biden's history and oversight of your role how do we bring that all together so that we get a both efforts move the ball down the field and that's what i'm really excited about i think the goal is common between the two i think we're talking about eliminating redundancy saving money and doing it in the most transparent and accountable way we possibly can so as i look at both things i came away thinking they're both good i think the as i mentioned earlier today i think that nothing works better than legislation with very firm dates in it i really truly believe that that's an observation not just from my time at the recovery board but throughout my federal career  i've seen bureaucrats change their mind about change and agree to do it once there's a law and they had firm dates so i'm very excited about your legislation i think the vice president is trying to get the ball moving and i think in large part the president's executive order establishing this board is so we can do some things now so we can take some lessons learned so we can adopt some of the ideas i have and others have about trying to export what we've done throughout government because it really would make things more efficient and it really would save money and i think the country needs that right now  weekend and like you i'm old enoughh not that you're oldh but i'm old enough to remember how sears used to work how macy's all of them used to work you used to have a tag either pinned or hanging from every piece of clothing and everything else you bought and it had a now nomenclature it said something and sometimes it had a number and every department had tags and when you bought something you had to put it take it to a department where the person was knowledgeable of how to add that item up and price it and you couldn't check out in one place because ultimately each department had the expertise they knew when was on special and so on last weekend i went through and like we all have come to expect there's a standard bar code on every product you can go to any checkout you scan that bar code they know what the price is they know what the discount is they know all the aspects it relieves it from inventory and you leave the store with one credit card receipt isn't that really what you're asking for all of us who are ultimately customers and vendors of the government is that we get to and in listening to your testimony i find it interesting that you didn't go where i thought you were going to go but i saw you going there when you talked about the secret and prevention making sure that the president the others are safe it is one thing to read a headline the day after and talk about what happened if harm came it's another thingh and you don't get a headline for this to make sure the same and i was thinkingh i was wondering how did you get there in other words accountability in agencies you said sometimes it's like a big plane or something like that and it seems like so often we don't think we can get our arms around this because there are so many moving parts so i'm trying to figure out with the executive order with the years that change in government is a difficult proposition people don't normally embrace change in government i've never been afraid of change i don't believe in change just for change sake but when it makes sense when you can save money or eliminate redundancy it strikes me that you have to change and particularly in the circumstances we currently live in so i think that both the executive order and the legislation are going to cause people to understand the changes at hand and we are moving in this direction smartly so i'm encouraged by that i had wondered whether or not the lessons learned in the recovery board would have been thought well enough to have been embedded in legislation and also in the executive order and i   i want you to tell us how significant that is because i agree with you on that the other thing that you talked about was technology do you think that weh do you think there's a technology that can even go further and be even more effective than what we now have and what suggestions would you have to us for improvingh i mean if you had to make some suggestions for improving the bill or improving the executive order i don't think i'm ready to start making suggestions about improving either one of them just yet i probably will have some thoughts later on i think the technology opportunities are profound right now and taking advantage of things like  computing or the geospatial technologies that we are using in recovery gov opens opportunities for the american public to actually for instance in the recovery program to drill down into their own zip codes or their own congressional districts and see exactly how that money is being used i don't think that's ever been possible before for the american public as an ig if i want to understand where the money went for instance at the department of interior i could have gone to the cfo and asked but i doubt very seriously whether that person could have responded certainly quickly so the new technologies have enabled the government that is stimulus as rapid as that was to ramp up to learn quickly how to do it and figure out how to do it and do it but it is still a onetime event and an ongoing every yeartype program what do you see as the differences between those two called for these websites and the reporting all be done in hmonths the fact that we had that deadline drove us to accomplish it getting the agencies omb and the recovery board to be marching towards that goal probably would have not been accomplished had that deadline not been in the act so i see legislation with concrete deadlines as they are embedded in the chairman's legislation as being a very good thing because it leaves the discussion about whether we want to change out of the picture change is going to happen and you only have a certain amount of time to do it mister lankford do you see an issue though with a onetime event like a think the recovery program was a proof of concept i think for those that had doubted that it could be done we've now shown that it has been done and it probably bodes well for future efforts  burden on recipients obviously this is a new layer of something that they have to be able to take on myh while i desperately want more transparency i agree completely with your statements about fraud that the more you allow people to be able to look in and be able to look over someone else shoulder and say why exactly is that grant funded that way and what is that that helps tremendously i also don't want to reduce the number of people competing for a competitive grant nor reduce the number of bidders in a contract situation talking about the burden on those recipients having to selfreport i do think that's going to drive away competition is it a reasonable amount of burden mister devaney i think it is a reasonable amount of burden i think it was a giant question when we first started when we first were talking about recipient reporting versus agency reporting i think the burden on recipients was the number one issue it was an issue for the states it was an issue for the recipients it certainly was an issue for the omb and for the board and we were very worried about that as a result we stood up a very robust help desk so that when recipients came in to report for the very first time and several reporting periods after that they had a lot of help but after two or three reporting periods we began to see that our help desk wasn't being used anymore and anecdotally we hear from states and from recipients that they like reporting on federalreporting gov i think what they would like best would only be to report to one place of multiple places so i think if we get down to one place where they can report and we use some of the technologies we used when we built federalreporting gov or use that infrastructure we won't have much of a is that the federal taxpayers paid for or the progress as is mentioned before is there a way to be able to track not only how much has been allotted to this but what's happened so far so people can see this much has been allotted this is what has been accomplished so far  absolutely we do something like that right now we ask recipients to tell us what stage the project's in we could certainly collect almost any data you wanted to collect you do get to a point where how much is too much but on the other hand if that's an important feature we can build it in we have the flexibility on the infrastructure we have right now to scale up to almost any amount of data to be collected mister lankford so if we're doing a grant for a certain project that denotes some research as you compare the grant application process with your reporting which one's harder to do the applications for competitive grants that you've seen over the years or your reporting  recovery board but for the great work you have done for a number of years as inspector general i had the good fortune to work as a united states attorney and spent much time with some of your colleagues and appreciate the significance of their efforts but oftentimes as well struggled with the reality that we would be oft just touching the corners sometimes of what we believed was out there and i have been intrigued by your testimony about some of the tools you have been discussing that can greatly enhance our ability to search not just where we have been but in realtime because your words i think to focus on preventing fraud from occurring in the first time rather than detecting it after the fact so can you tell me a little bit about the recovery explorer tool that you have been implementing and how that works mister devaney well the recovery operations center which we established fairly early on after about six months utilize one end of the timeline the fraudster is thinking about stealing money and the other end is sort of when he has it and he is running down the street what we are trying to do is we are trying to push the ball further up toward the front end so that we are either preventing fraud in the first instance or at least interrupting it in the middle countless times we have been able to detect a company or an individual that has gotten money that probably shouldn't have been it doesn't mean that they committed a crime it just means that we need to stop and look so we have asked the agencies to stop the flow of money so that it all doesn't go out the door before we are able to prevent it now as i mentioned earlier it is difficult to articulate success in this area how much you have prevented from happening it is a lot easier for me to stand here and talk about the number of arrests or number of referrals to the department of justice and that is what i have done for most of my career played that sort of stat game  harder to articulate success in the prevention business i struggle with it myself but i know thath i know that i think we have prevented fraud in this instance and i think transparency has a lot to do about it but it is also about sort of a mind shift that i and other enforcement entities are having about not just detecting it but preventing it from happening mister meehan what kind of data does it display when you are talking about the broad spectrum of information that is out there is there an intelligent aspect to this in which instance this would be a good candidate to audit to have an ig do an audit onh not an investigation but an audit on the other hand it might identify as we do countless times money going to somebody who is on the excluded parties list because we have that database inhouse i happen to think that one of the issues that is under way in government right now beinghmanaged by omb is the donotpay list i happen to think that  platform could do the donotpay list fairly soon i think we have three of the databases of the five right now if we got the other two we could probably stand that up maybe in a month or two so there are great opportunities here to have it centralized in one place so that both agency personnel can come into the recovery operations center before they give the money out and that enforcers like igs or the fbi or gao can access information and maybe on take what we have done here and apply it to all government spending we will be preventing billions of dollars of fraud and we may be putting investigative bodies and u s attorneys out of business mister meehan well there is plenty of work for all of us to do when you talk billions of dollars that raise the issue of tax expenditures as it applies to these issues if that is all right with you your thoughts on whether tax expenditures should be incorporated into this sort of executive order or into the first question asked of us was well why didn't you detect that and that is because you know there are prohibitions from the irs of sharing with us taxpayer information so i think perhaps the time has come for some waivers from that act and i would love to see that the ability for us to have a database that had the individuals that owed tax money we could keep that in a very secure environment and clear something up i am unclear on there are tax expenditures and then there are tax cheats or detected tax cheats if i understood correctly the database that potentially legislation would give you would be the leadership of the house appropriations committee's financial services subcommittee urging them to restore funding for the electronic government fund their letter said this and i quote cuts to the egovernment fund in fy two thousand and eleven have already  fund supports powerful tools for reducing waste fraud and abuse and for creating privatesector jobs and given appropriate funding these projects result in benefits far in excess of their cost mr hdevaney you have some practical experience with the technological tools for routing out waste fraud and abuse you just talked about it when you talk about the cloud system recovery gov is one of our best examples of transparencyenabled accountability do you agree on the importance of these web sites for generating accountability mister devaney i do i have become a very aggressive advocate of transparency if you believe as i do that transparency drives accountability ultimately you save money and that money is far are the resource limitations if any in extending this kind of system governmentwide and how tall an order is that mister devaney well with respect to money i don't think it is actually much money it is far below what people might imagine it to be i think with a little extra money the board would be able to use its existing infrastructure and sit some of these other systems on top of that and create a one platform as the chairman mentioned earlier that would do essentially the same thing before we in fact fill if you will but your proposal and what is intended out of our legislation and quite frankly what is intended out of the president's executive order will ultimately save money on two front it one is if you move to cloud computing if you tell essentially all the agencies that we are going to have this single checkout place that is really good at checking out that sets it up that relieves that burden other than transition costs no matter what that cost ish and you are right we shouldn't sit here and try to say it is fifty one dollars million or it is five dollars ten cents millionh isn't it inevitable that that cost posttransition is less than we spend on this labyrinth of questioner some years agoh and you have been in government for plus years well this was about thirty of those years ago if you remember the scandal when they found out that the federal government the largest purchaser of ibm selectric typewriters in the world paid more than the state of california paid for ibm's selectric's contracth selectric ii or selectric i and there was no fraud they simply bid two separate times and california apparently was just a little better in the bid and ibm came in less and the government didn't know about it until a whistleblower found out that in a combined agency that the state paid less for the same typewriter and that person tried buy through the state to save money it is now thirty years later if we are paying for a dell computer if we are paying twenty different amounts hypothetically based on bids and dell computers would be a bad example but if we do have these discrepancies between hundreds of different purchase prices on substantially or identically the same thing do you have the resources in government or do you know of those resources that would call that out so that we platform it would strike me that we could do it a lot cheaper because we would eliminate all of the myriad of buying opportunities that are going on right now across the government and centralize it in one place and achieve the leverage that we would need over the vendors so even though that is not the first generation of what you are doing the idea that when people roll up what they are paying that you can look and say where are the anomalies and how much we are paying where are the best values that is pretty easy to do over the historically these reportings have been done by essentially cabinet positions and subcabinet positions both the president and we are talking about a single point are we talking in the best case about a single point that is independent or is there any other conceivable way that would be as good as an agency that did one and only one thing which was to run this collection enforcement the allig board clearly indicates the independence that we all strive for and probably raises the public's perception tremendously that they are getting you know an honest shot here i think however that to make things work to actually get the job done you have to have a synergy between a board and the federal agencies and  board that has that kind of mix on it i think would be a good idea i think that if a majority or at least half of the members are igs it presents that sort of optics of independence that i think is important as well so i think the board that is contemplated in the law that you have proffered and also my understanding is the vice president'sh the president's executive order the vice president's intention is to try to achieve that balance on that board as well chairman issa so what you are saying is no matter how we achieve the board as long as it is independent and perceived legitimately to be independent it can work if it becomes captured by any one agency but we will use our subpoena power to bring you back to get educated you know there are just some things we can't live without and one of them is your advice and counsel i know we would never have to use that you have been very generous with your time  both at these hearings and anytime we have called on you for advice so i want to thank you publicly for that i want to pledge on behalf of the ranking member and myself both you are one of the few people that we agree on we don't have arguments about the job you are doing we want to see you succeed and we want to see you have a legacy so on behalf of the committee thank you for your service and we look forward to continuing to work with you in the future and with that we