Federal Government Information Technology

Despite FITARA, CIOs still don't have an overview of agency IT investments

Fedscoop: Federal agencies still don’t have clear insight into where and how they’re spending IT dollars, according to a new Government Accountability Office report.

Reviewing data from fiscal 2016 contracts at 22 agencies, GAO found that most did not properly enumerate all that they’d spent on IT. All together the agencies were able to identify 78,249 IT-related contracts, on which they had spent $14.7 billion. A GAO review, however, found that 31,493 additional contracts worth $4.5 billion were not included in the agencies’ reporting.

The discrepancies between the reported number and GAO’s number differed among agencies. The Department of Education, NASA and the Department of State, for example, were able to identify their IT spend within a close margin (State identified all but 1 percent, the report says). Other agencies, like the departments of Health and Human Services and Transportation, did not do so well. Altogether “8 agencies did not identify over 40 percent of their IT-related contract obligations,” the report states.

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