As the nation’s principal conservation agency, Interior has responsibility for managing most of our nationally owned public lands and natural resources. This includes fostering the wisest use of our land and water resources, protecting our fish and wildlife, and preserving the environmental and cultural values of our national parks and historic places. Interior employs about 70,000 full-time equivalent staff and delivers a wide range of services through its bureaus, services, and offices at over 2,000 field locations across the country. Three Interior bureaus—the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the National Park Service, and the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)—and USDA’s Forest Service share responsibilities for managing public lands. While all have separate missions, they manage adjacent lands in many areas throughout the country and have some responsibilities that overlap. Over the last several years, Interior and the Forest Service have collocated some offices or shared space with other federal agencies, and have pursued other means of streamlining, sharing resources, and saving rental costs. To carry out its broad missions, Interior and its bureaus spend more than $62 million each year on telecommunications resources that are used to provide a wide array of voice, data, radio, and video services. These include a variety of telecommunications services acquired under the General Services Administration’s Federal Telecommunications System (FTS) 2000 contract as well as from local and long-distance telephone carriers and commercial vendors. Interior was unable to provide us with its total fiscal year 1996 telecommunications costs because commercial telecommunications costs and costs for some other services are paid directly by Interior bureaus; these costs are not aggregated or tracked at the Department level. However, for 1 year—fiscal year 1995—in response to a survey we conducted, Interior estimated that it spent about $62 million on telecommunications equipment and services. This included about $29 million for FTS 2000 services and about $33 million for commercial and other services. Estimated fiscal year 1995 costs for radio equipment and service are not included in these totals. The Forest Service, which employs more than 30,000 full-time staff, spent about $33 million for telecommunications in fiscal year 1996. The Forest Service and Interior expect to collectively spend up to several hundred millon dollars over the next 8 years acquiring new radio equipment and services to convert to narrowband requirements by 2005. As we previously reported at USDA, consolidating and optimizing telecommunications offers organizations a way to reduce costs by combining resources and services where sharing opportunities exist and by eliminating unnecessary services. For example, the cost to access FTS 2000 services can sometimes be greatly reduced where there are multiple FTS 2000 service delivery points that can be combined to increase the volume of communications traffic among fewer points, thereby, obtaining volume discounts. Additional savings can be achieved by selecting more efficient service and equipment alternatives. Because there can be additional equipment and transmission costs associated with implementing consolidation and optimization alternatives, such costs will offset some of the savings. The 1996 Clinger-Cohen Act and federal guidance highlight the need for federal organizations to acquire and use information technology in the most cost-effective way and identify and act on opportunities to reduce costs by sharing resources where possible. In so doing, federal organizations should identify areas of duplication and work together to best utilize telecommunications and other information technology that can reduce expenditures and redundant functions. Not taking steps that maximize use of telecommunications resources and achieve optimum service at the lowest possible cost can result in the needless waste of government dollars. Our 1995 report noted that USDA had hundreds of field office sites where multiple agencies, located within the same building or geographic area, obtained and used separate and often redundant telecommunications services. Because of this and because USDA had not acted on opportunities to consolidate and optimize telecommunications services, the Department wasted millions of dollars each year paying for redundant services it did not need. Interior’s acting chief information officer (CIO) is responsible for advising and assisting the Secretary and other senior managers to ensure that the Department’s information technology investments are acquired and managed consistent with federal law and the priorities of the Secretary. Under the direction and leadership of the acting CIO, Interior’s Office of Information Resources Management (OIRM) is responsible for ensuring that the Department’s telecommunications resources are cost effectively managed and for overseeing and guiding Interior bureaus in the acquisition, development, management, and use of such resources. In addition, heads of Interior bureaus are responsible for implementing a program that will ensure compliance with Interior policies and for designating telecommunications managers who plan, implement, and manage telecommunications activities within their respective organizations. The bureaus are also responsible for determining whether their telecommunications requirements can be satisfied through existing resources and for sharing telecommunications services and equipment with other bureaus and agencies to the maximum extent practical. As with Interior, the Forest Service delegates responsibility for telecommunications management and the sharing of these resources to its regional and field components. To address our objectives, we reviewed documentation reporting telecommunications usage and costs for Interior and USDA’s Forest Service and we interviewed Interior and USDA officials to discuss consolidation and sharing activities. To review consolidation and sharing activities, we selected four locations where Interior officials told us offices were collocated and actions were underway to consolidate and optimize telecommunications resources and services. Specifically, we visited Interior bureau offices in Lakewood and Durango, Colorado; Farmington, New Mexico; and Cheyenne, Wyoming. In addition, we discussed sharing projects underway or planned with Interior and Forest Service officials at offices in Lakewood and Durango. We also reviewed reports and billing information showing FTS 2000 and commercial carrier costs to confirm our results. Appendix I provides further details on our scope and methodology. We conducted our review from August 1996 through March 1997, in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. We provided a draft of this report to Interior and USDA for comment. Interior’s and USDA’s comments are discussed in the report and are included in full in appendixes II and III, respectively. To its credit, Interior has undertaken a number of cost-saving initiatives to eliminate some unused telephone lines and unnecessary data services. While significant savings have been achieved in some cases, such efforts have generally been isolated and ad hoc rather than departmentwide. Savings are being missed because Interior is not systematically identifying and acting on opportunities to consolidate and share telecommunications resources within and among its bureaus or its 2,000-plus field locations. At just four of these field locations, we found that bureaus and offices were paying thousands of dollars annually for telecommunications services that were redundant and unnecessary. Interior does not know to what extent similar telecommunications savings may exist at its other offices because it lacks the basic information necessary to make such determinations. Interior is not systematically identifying opportunities among collocated bureau offices to consolidate and optimize telecommunications resources. Interior’s multiple bureaus have numerous field office sites in the same building or geographic area, but they obtain and use telecommunications equipment and services independently. This can result in the use of redundant and/or more costly telecommunications services than necessary at these sites. Nevertheless, OIRM—which has responsibility for managing and overseeing Interior’s telecommunications activities—has not exercised effective leadership by establishing a departmentwide program for systematically identifying telecommunications inefficiencies that may exist and achieving savings among bureaus and offices across the Department. Instead, OIRM relies on each of Interior’s separate bureaus to identify and act on such opportunities. Yet, according to bureau telecommunications officials, this is rarely done and savings opportunities may be lost. Although we only visited a few of Interior’s field sites during our review, we found that bureau offices in Lakewood, Durango, and Farmington spent thousands of dollars over the last several years for unnecessary commercial long-distance telephone and redundant FTS 2000 data services. In one case, billing records show that two bureau offices in the one building in Lakewood were spending about $4,400 annually for unnecessary FTS 2000 services because these services had not been consolidated and shared. In addition, we found bureau offices in Farmington located close by one another yet still using separate data connections to the same cities; opportunities to share these services in order to reduce costs had not been investigated. While many bureau telecommunications managers and staff told us they would like to take advantage of savings by consolidating and sharing resources at locations, given their other duties, it is not a priority. Specifically, these officials said that they spend most of their time maintaining current operations and providing their bureau field offices with technical assistance. As a result, they assert that they rarely have time to look for such consolidation opportunities among bureau offices. Even if pursuing consolidation opportunities was a priority, the bureaus do not have the information necessary to identify where Interior offices are collocated and determine whether telecommunications savings opportunities exist at these locations. Specifically, at the time of our review, neither OIRM nor the bureaus had determined which of the Department’s 2,000-plus field sites are located within the same building or geographic area, and OIRM was unable to provide us with a current list of all Interior office sites. Following our exit briefing with Interior at the end of February 1997, the Department began to develop this information by extracting and analyzing data from several of its administrative management databases. These are positive steps that should help the Department begin to identify savings opportunities. Interior bureaus also lack information needed to adequately analyze cost-savings opportunities that may exist at collocated bureau sites. According to Interior policy, bureaus are required to maintain inventories of all of their telecommunications resources. However, at the time of our review, the bureaus did not maintain up-to-date and complete inventories of all their telecommunications resources and OIRM has not followed up to ensure that they do so. Without information such as this that describes types of telecommunications equipment and services at individual bureau offices, Interior cannot easily determine where it has opportunities to consolidate and optimize telecommunications resources among multiple bureau offices.