Most improvements to federal departments and independent agencies recommended by the investigative arm of Congress were successfully implemented, according to an analysis made public Wednesday.
Using a sophisticated form of data-driven textual analysis, the research group Deloitte LLP found that 81 percent of more than 40,000 recommendations made by the Government Accountability Office over the past 31 years were successfully implemented.
“This report is one of the first deep analyses of government data using text analytics,” said Deloitte director of public research William D. Eggers in a statement. “It not only unearthed key insights that would be nearly impossible for the human eye to see, but it will help federal leaders improve the structures of their internal oversight activities to quantify accountability and drive results.”
Recommendations that mention high-ranking officials or Congress — especially the Appropriations Committees — are among the least likely to be successfully implemented.
Other problem areas were recommendations that deal with data, healthcare, transportation or span across multiple agencies.
“Overall, these findings reinforce well-known trends in the government,” the report said.
However, recommendations that involved information security, information technology, education and equal opportunity typically saw successful implementation.
“These top-line trends transcended party control and presidential management agendas,” the report said.
Additionally, recommendations related to audits, government operations, law enforcement, national defense and the environment accounted for 51 percent of the GAO’s recommendations since 1980.
Also, the number of recommendations in a certain areas did not improve the likelihood that implementation would be successful.
“In other words, an agency seems no more likely to implement a recommendation in the ‘information systems’ category whether it receives 100 or 500 recommendations in that category,” Deloitte said.
The GAO declined to comment before fully reviewing the report.
A previous Washington Examiner investigation found that nearly 9,000 GAO recommendations were ignored since 1982. Recommendations from 1,700 reports remain open across more than 200 agencies. More than 500 of those were related to homeland security.
Among the unimplemented GAO recommendations found by the Examiner was a 1996 GAO report that said domestic airliners could be future terrorism targets.
The Examiner also found that the Department of Homeland Security accumulated more unresolved recommendations than any other federal agency except for the Department of Defense. Consequently, Deloitte noted that recommendations concerning homeland security were beginning to be more common than environmental issues, which was previously among the top five.
