During the last decade, Congress and the administration have taken several steps to improve the transparency of federal spending data. In 2006, Congress passed and the President signed the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (FFATA) to increase the transparency and accountability of federal contracts and financial assistance awards. Among other things, FFATA required OMB to establish USAspending.gov, containing obligational data on federal awards and subawards, which was launched in December 2007. One of the stated purposes of the DATA Act is to expand FFATA to include direct federal agency expenditures and link contract, loan, and grant spending information to federal programs so that taxpayers and policy makers can more effectively track federal spending. Reporting throughout the federal spending cycle. Full and effective implementation of the DATA Act will allow funds to be tracked at multiple points in the federal spending lifecycle. For example, once fully implemented, amounts appropriated, obligated, and subsequently outlayed for a particular program activity would all be publicly available on USAspending.gov or a successor website. These additional federal spending cycle data on appropriations, obligations, and outlays will provide more transparency on federal awards. USAspending.gov provides information on award amounts for grants, contracts, and other types of information, but the only information currently available is data on federal award obligations. The DATA Act represents a significant change to the types of data reported by requiring additional budget and financial information, which, to date, has not been reported on USAspending.gov. The act requires budget and financial information to be reported on a monthly basis if practicable, but not less than quarterly. However, OMB’s May 2015 guidance directs agencies to continue reporting on awards data at least bi-weekly. To cover appropriations and outlays in addition to obligations, OMB and Treasury officials noted that data will need to be pulled from budgetary and financial systems in addition to the multiple contract and assistance systems currently used. It is essential that all of this data be appropriately linked to achieve the full potential for users of this data inside and outside of government. Reporting on more types of federal spending. The DATA Act requires reporting on almost all types of federal spending. Currently, USAspending.gov reports data on federal awards including grants, contracts, and loans. Under the DATA Act, however, more budget and financial information will be available that should allow users of the data to organize and analyze the data in ways that are not currently possible. Some of these new types of spending information include: Budget and financial information on the different types of goods and services purchased by the federal government, such as personnel compensation, will be reported in the aggregate. Budget and financial information from financial arrangements of the federal government, such as public-private partnerships, interagency agreements, and user charges, will also be reported. As part of their guidance to agencies on DATA Act implementation, OMB lowered the threshold at which agencies must report data on financial assistance and procurement prime awards from $25,000 or greater to those awards greater than the micro-purchase threshold, which is currently $3,500. Improving data quality. Our prior work found that unclear guidance and weaknesses in executive branch oversight contributed to persistent challenges with data on USAspending.gov. These challenges relate to the quality and completeness of data submitted by federal agencies. For example, in 2010, we reported that USAspending.gov did not include information on awards from 15 programs at 9 agencies for fiscal year 2008. In that report we also reviewed a sample of 100 awards on the website and found that each award had at least one data error. In June 2014, we reported that roughly $619 billion in assistance awards were not properly reported in fiscal year 2012. In addition, we found that few reported awards—between 2 and 7 percent—contained information that was fully consistent with agency records for all 21 data elements we examined. A factor that contributed to this error rate was the lack of guidance on how to interpret some data elements including award description. See appendix II for more information on our recommendations related to these findings and OMB’s and Treasury’s actions to date. The DATA Act identifies the improvement of data quality as one of its purposes. Toward that end, the act requires that inspectors general conduct reviews of data samples submitted by their respective agency and subsequently assess and report on the data’s completeness, timeliness, quality, and accuracy. We are required to review these reports and then assess and compare the completeness, timeliness, quality, and accuracy of the data across the federal government. OMB and Treasury issued initial guidance to federal agencies in May 2015 on reporting requirements pursuant to FFATA as well as the new requirements that agencies must employ pursuant to the DATA Act. The guidance also directs agencies to implement data definition standards for the collection and reporting of agency-level and award-level data by May 9, 2017; implement a standard data exchange format for providing data to Treasury to be displayed on USAspending.gov or a successor site; and link agency financial systems with award systems by continuing the use of specified unique identification numbers for financial assistance awards and contracts. OMB asked agencies to submit DATA Act implementation plans in September 2015, concurrent with the fiscal year 2017 budget request. According to OMB staff, as of December 2015, all 24 CFO Act agencies as well as 27 smaller federal agencies have submitted implementation plans. OMB required the plans to include: (1) a timeline of tasks and steps toward implementing the requirements of this guidance; (2) an estimate of costs to implement these tasks and steps; (3) a detailed narrative that explains the required steps, identifies the underlying assumptions, and outlines the potential difficulties and risks to successfully implement the plan; and (4) a detailed project plan that agencies will develop over time. Additionally, OMB and Treasury issued a DATA Act Implementation Playbook in June 2015, which recommends eight key steps for agencies to fulfill their requirements under the DATA Act (see table 1). To support this effort, OMB and Treasury issued guidance to help agencies develop the plans and hosted workshops and conference calls to address agency questions. The DATA Act requires OMB and Treasury to establish government-wide financial data standards for any federal funds made available to or expended by federal agencies and recipients of federal funds. The specific items to be reported under the act are generally referred to as data elements. The overall data standardization effort consists of two distinct, but related, components: (1) establishing definitions which describe what is included in each data element with the aim of ensuring that information will be consistent and comparable, and (2) creating a data exchange standard with technical specifications which describe the format, structure, tagging, and transmission of each data element. The data exchange standard is also intended to depict the relationships between standardized data elements. On May 8, 2015, a year after the passage of the DATA Act, OMB and Treasury issued the first 15 standardized data element definitions, including definitions for 8 new elements introduced by the DATA Act. From June through August 2015, OMB and Treasury released an additional 42 standardized data element definitions for reporting under FFATA, as amended by the DATA Act. During this time, OMB and Treasury released data element definitions in stages and opened a 3- week feedback period for federal and nonfederal stakeholders to provide public input on the definitions before they were issued. During this period we separately met with OMB and Treasury staff several times to share our views and identify issues and concerns with proposed definitions. See figure 1 for a listing of the 57 standardized data elements grouped by type. See appendix III for the definitions of each of the data elements. The DATA Act requires that data standards—to the extent reasonable and practicable—incorporate widely-accepted common data elements, such as those developed by international standards-setting bodies, federal agencies with authority over contracting and financial assistance, and accounting standards organizations. Incorporating leading practices from international standards organizations offers one way to help reduce uncertainty and confusion when reporting and interpreting data standards. Developing a well-crafted data element definition is one key component to ensuring that a data standard produces consistent and comparable information. The ISO, a standards-setting body composed of international experts in various fields of study, has developed 13 leading practices for formulating data definitions for the purposes of specifying, describing, explaining, and clarifying the meaning of data. These practices include that definitions be precise and unambiguous, avoid circular reasoning, and be expressed without embedding definitions of other data or underlying concepts, among others. We found that the 57 DATA Act data element definitions largely followed ISO leading practices for the formulation of data definitions. Specifically, 12 data element definitions met all of the ISO leading practices and each of the remaining 45 definitions met no fewer than 9 leading practices, meaning that even the lowest-rated data elements in our review adhered to almost 70 percent of the ISO leading practices. We also found variation in which of the leading practices each definition satisfied. For example, our analysis found that all 57 definitions followed the leading practices of avoiding circular reasoning and being stated as a descriptive phrase or sentence, whereas 38 of the 57 were determined to be sufficiently precise and unambiguous. Table 2 provides a summary of our findings applying the ISO leading practices for formulating data definitions to the definitions developed by OMB and Treasury as part of DATA Act implementation. Although most of the definitions generally adhered to ISO leading practices, examples where data elements did not do so raise potential concerns regarding an increased risk that agencies may not apply the definitions consistently, thus affecting the comparability of reported data. Data element definitions that are imprecise or ambiguous may allow for more than one interpretation by agency staff collecting, compiling, and reporting on these data and thus could result in inconsistent and potentially misleading reporting when aggregated across government or compared between agencies.