Fiscal year 2002 was a year of challenges, not just for GAO but also for the Congress and the nation. The nation’s vulnerabilities were exposed in a series of events—America’s vulnerability to sophisticated terrorist networks, bioterrorism waged through mechanisms as mundane as the daily mail, and corporate misconduct capable of wiping out jobs, pensions, and investments virtually overnight. As the Congress’s priorities changed to meet these crises, GAO’s challenge was to respond quickly and effectively to our congressional clients’ changing needs. With work already underway across a spectrum of critical policy and performance issues, we had a head start toward meeting the Congress’ needs in a year of unexpected and often tumultuous events. For example, in fiscal year 2002 GAO’s work informed the debate over national preparedness strategy, helping the Congress determine how best to organize and manage major new departments, assess key vulnerabilities to homeland defense, and respond to the events of September 11 in areas such as terrorism insurance and airline security. GAO’s input also was a major factor in shaping the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, as well as new rules to strengthen corporate governance and ensure auditor independence. Further, GAO’s work helped the Congress develop and enact election reform legislation in the form of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to help restore voter confidence. In fiscal year 2002, GAO also served the Congress and the American people by helping to: Contribute to a national preparedness strategy at the federal, state, and local levels that will make Americans safer from terrorism Protect investors through better oversight of the securities industry and Ensure a safer national food supply Expose the inadequacy of nursing home care Make income tax collection fair, effective, and less painful to taxpayers Strengthen public schools’ accountability for educating children Keep sensitive American technologies out of the wrong hands Protect American armed forces confronting chemical or biological weapons Identify the risks to employees in private pension programs Identify factors causing the shortage of children’s vaccines Assist the postal system in addressing anthrax and various management challenges Identify security risks at ports, airports, and transit systems Save billions by bringing sound business practices to the Department of Foster human capital strategic management to create a capable, effective, Ensure that the armed forces are trained and equipped to meet the nation’s defense commitments Enhance the safety of Americans and foreign nationals at U.S. Assess ways of improving border security through biometric technologies Reduce the international debt problems faced by poor countries Reform the way federal agencies manage their finances Protect government computer systems from security threats Enhance the transition of e-government—the new “electronic connection” between government and the public During fiscal year 2002, GAO’s analyses and recommendations contributed to a wide range of legislation considered by the Congress, as shown in the following table. By year’s end, we had testified 216 times before the Congress, sometimes on as little as 24 hours’ notice, on a range of issues. We had responded to hundreds of urgent requests for information. We had developed 1,950 recommendations for improving the government’s operations, including, for example, those we made to the Secretary of State calling for the development of a governmentwide plan to help other countries combat nuclear smuggling and those we made to the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission calling for his agency to develop an action plan for overseeing competitive energy markets. We also had continued to track the recommendations we had made in past years, checking to see that they had been implemented and, if not, whether we needed to do follow-up work on problem areas. We found, in fact, that 79 percent of the recommendations we had made in fiscal year 1998 had been implemented, a significant step when the work we have done for the Congress becomes a catalyst for creating tangible benefits for the American people. Table 2 highlights, by GAO’s three external strategic goals, examples of issues on which we testified before Congress during fiscal year 2002. Congress and the executive agencies took a wide range of actions in fiscal year 2002 to improve government operations, reduce costs, or better target budget authority based on GAO analyses and recommendations, as highlighted in the following sections. Federal action on GAO’s findings or recommendations produced financial benefits for the American people: a total of $37.7 billion was achieved by making government services more efficient, improving the budgeting and spending of tax dollars, and strengthening the management of federal resources (see fig. 1). For example, increased funding for improved safeguards against fraud and abuse helped the Medicare program to better control improper payments of $8.1 billion over 2 years, and better policies and controls reduced losses from farm loan programs by about $4.8 billion across 5 years. In fiscal year 2002, we also recorded 906 instances in which our work led to improvements in government operations or programs (see fig. 2). For example, by acting on GAO’s findings or recommendations, the federal government has taken important steps toward enhancing aviation safety, improving pediatric drug labeling based on research, better targeting of funds to high-poverty school districts, greater accountability in the federal acquisition process, and more effective delivery of disaster recovery assistance to other nations, among other achievements. As shown in table 3, we met all of our annual performance targets except our timeliness target. While we provided 96 percent of our products to their congressional requesters by the date promised, we missed this measure’s target of 98 percent on-time delivery. The year’s turbulent events played a part in our missing the target, causing us to delay work in progress when higher-priority requests came in from the Congress. We know we will continue to face factors beyond our control as we strive to improve our performance in this area. We believe the agency protocols we are piloting will help clarify aspects of our interactions with the agencies we evaluate and audit and, thus, expedite our work in ways that could improve the timeliness of our final products. We also believe that our continuing investments in human capital and information technology will improve our timeliness while allowing us to maintain our high level of productivity and performance overall. The results of our work were possible, in part, because of changes we have made to maximize the value of GAO. We had already realigned GAO’s structure and resources to better serve the Congress in its legislative, oversight, appropriations, and investigative roles. Over the past year, we cultivated and fostered congressional and agency relations, better refined our strategic and annual planning and reporting processes, and enhanced our information technology infrastructure. We also continued to provide priority attention to our management challenges of human capital, information security, and physical security. Changes we made in each of these areas helped enable us to operate in a constantly changing environment. Over the course of the year, we cultivated and fostered congressional and agency relations in several ways. On October 23, 2001, in response to the anthrax incident on Capitol Hill, we opened our doors to 435 members of the House of Representatives and their staffs. Later in the year, we continued with our traditional hill outreach meetings and completed a 7- month pilot test of a system for obtaining clients’ views on the quality of our testimonies and reports. We also developed agency protocols to provide clearly defined, consistently applied, well-documented, and transparent policies for conducting our work with federal agencies. We have implemented our new reporting product line entitled Highlights—a one-page summary that provides the key findings and recommendations from a GAO engagement. We continued our policy of outreach to our congressional clients, the public, and the press to enhance the accessibility of GAO products. Our external web site now logs about 100,000 visitors each day and more than 1 million GAO products are downloaded every month by our congressional clients, the public, and the press. In light of certain records access challenges during the past few years and with concerns about national and homeland security unusually high at home and abroad, it may become more difficult for us to obtain information from the Executive Branch and report on certain issues. If this were to occur, it would hamper our ability to complete congressional requests in a timely manner. We are updating GAO’s engagement acceptance policies and practices to address this issue and may recommend legislative changes that will help to assure that we have reasonable and appropriate information that we need to conduct our work for the Congress and the country. GAO’s strategic planning process serves as a model for the federal government. Our plan aligns GAO’s resources to meet the needs of the Congress, address emerging challenges and achieve positive results. Following the spirit of the Government Performance and Results Act, we established a process that provides for updates with each new Congress, ongoing analysis of emerging conditions and trends, extensive consultations with congressional clients and outside experts, and assessments of our internal capacities and needs. At the beginning of fiscal year 2002, we updated our strategic plan for serving the Congress based on substantial congressional input—extending the plan’s perspective out to fiscal year 2007 and factoring in developments that had occurred since we first issued it in fiscal year 2000. The updated plan carries forward the four strategic goals we had already established as the organizing principles for a body of work that is as wide- ranging as the interests and concerns of the Congress itself. Using the plan as a blueprint, we lay out the areas in which we expect to conduct research, audits, analyses, and evaluations to meet our clients’ needs, and we allocate the resources we receive from the Congress accordingly. Following is our strategic plan framework. Appendix I of this statement delineates in a bit more detail our strategic objectives and our qualitative performance goals for fiscal years 2002 and 2003. We issued our 2001 Performance and Accountability Report that combines information on our past year’s accomplishments and progress in meeting our strategic goals with our plans for achieving our fiscal year 2003 performance goals. The report earned a Certificate of Excellence in Accountability Reporting from the Association of Government Accountants.