I left off yesterday pointing out three critical failures in the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act)
Those failures were:
- Undefined goals with unrealistic deadlines.
- Lack of incentives for performance.
- Lack of funding for assigned duties.
Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) [DOA]
Make no mistake, I think transparency, particularly in government spending is very important.
Important enough that proposals for transparency should take it seriously.
In broad strokes, here is my alternative to the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act) proposal:
- Ask the GAO, the federal agency with the most experience auditing other federal agencies, to prepare an estimate for:
- Cost/Time for preparing a program internal to the GAO to produce mappings of agency financial records to a common report form.
- Cost/Time to train GAO personnel on the mapping protocol.
- Cost/Time for additional GAO staff for the creation of the mapping protocol and permanent GAO staff as liaisons with particular agencies.
- Recommendations for incentives to promote assistance from agencies.
- Upon approval and funding of the GAO proposal, which should include at least two federal agencies as test cases, that:
- Test case agencies are granted additional funding for training and staff to cooperate with the GAO mapping team.
- Test case agencies are granted additional funding for training and staff to produce reports as specified by the GAO.
- Staff in test case agencies are granted incentives to assist in the initial mapping effort and maintenance of the same. (Positive incentives.)
- The program of mapping of accounts expand no more often than every two to three years and only if prior agencies have achieved and remain in conformance.
Some critical differences between my sketch of a proposal and the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act):
- Additional responsibilities and requirements will be funded for agencies, including additional training and personnel.
- Agency staff will have incentives to learn the new skills and procedures necessary for exporting their data as required by the GAO.
- Instead of trying to swallow the Federal whale, the project proceeds incrementally and with demonstrable results.
Topic maps can play an important role in such a project but we should be mindful that projects rarely succeed or fail because of technology.
Project fail because, like the DATA Act, they ignore basic human needs, experience in similar situations (9/11), and substitute abuse for legitimate incentives.