The National Performance Review (NPR) assessment in 1993 was that federal Inspectors General emphasized compliance monitoring over waste detection and prevention. The NPR recommended that responsibility for compliance monitoring be reassigned from the Inspectors General offices to other offices more closely associated with agency management--in other words, internal auditing. This research analyzes the potential impact of transferring the role of compliance monitoring outside of the Inspectors General offices.
Major reforms in the way government conducts its business and accounts for itself were enacted in the last 25 years (Kamensky, 1996, pp. 3-6). They reflect an intense insistence on accountability, a respect for professionalism, and a growing concern about the federal deficit. One of the earlier measures was the Congressional Budget Impoundment and Control Act of 1974. This was initially intended to preclude the president from preventing the expenditure of appropriated funds but has since become the mechanism for reducing expenditures. It subjected the expenditures from all appropriations committees to overall spending and revenue targets, chartered the congressional budget committees, established the reconciliation process, and through later amendments and refinements defined and tried to control the federal deficit.
The emergence of the Inspectors General--first in the Department of Health Education and Welfare (1976) and later (1978) in other federal departments--as independent challengers of fraud, waste, and abuse ranks among the major reforms of government processes.
Other important parts of the accountability arsenal are the Federal Managers Financial Integrity Act of 1982, which requires federal agencies to ensure the adequacy of management control and financial systems; the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, which establishes clear responsibilities for overseeing financial management activities and for the sy...