A New Scandal Brewing at IRS – Plus the DorobekINSIDER’s 7 Stories

On GovLoop Insights’ DorobekINSIDER:

• Last March the Office of Management and Budget unveiled PortfolioStat. The goal was simple, help agencies save time, money and resources by giving them a tool to asses their portfolio management process. We talk to OMB’s Andrew McMahon about how PortfolioStat is going one year later.

The SEVEN stories that impact your life

1. The IRS has a new potential scandal on its hands. An inspector general report released showed the agency spent $50 million on 220 conferences over a three-year period. The report comes as three Congressional committees are investigating charges of politically motivated enforcement. At one conference in California, some of the 2,600 attendees received baseball tickets and stayed in fancy suites worth more than a $1,000 per night. The agency spent $135,000 on more than a dozen outside speakers. Acting Commissioner Danny Werfel calls the spending an unfortunate vestige from a prior era, reports Federal News Radio.
2. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration canceled furloughs for its employees after the Commerce Department and congressional negotiators agreed on a new budget deal, according to multiple reports. Department officials were able to obtain budget flexibility, allowing the agency to transfer funds and avoid furloughs for all 12,000 of its employees, reports GovExec.
3. The Treasury Department has suspended investments into the government securities G Fund, using the most stable of the federal employee pension funds to delay hitting the government’s debt ceiling, reports GovExec.
4. By 2016 or 2017, the Office of Personnel Management hopes to have a major IT upgrade in place to speed up the processing of federal retirees’ pensions. But even when the new Case Management System, or CMS, is in place, the government will still be decades away from its ultimate goal: a completely automated system that calculates new pensions with minimal human involvement, reports Federal Times.
5. One of the Navy’s tactics for dealing with sequestration is to not mow it’s grass. Federal News Radio reports, the Hampton Roads installations in southeast Virginia are letting the grass grow a foot tall before it’s trimmed. The move is expected to save the Navy nearly $2 million this year. The Virginian-Pilot reports: there’s a downside — an unsightly front yard. It reports thigh-high weeds at Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach. The Navy is facing a $4 billion spending cut because of sequestration.
6. GSA’s Kathleen Turco is stepping down as the associate administrator of governmentwide policy at the General Services Administration. She will become the chief financial officer of the Veterans Health Administration, reports Federal News Radio. While at GSA, Turco oversaw a reorganization of the office of governmentwide policy. She headed the group as it led e-government initiatives like data.gov.
7. And on GovLoop: Here is a staggering stat: 130 millions Americans own a smartphone, including roughly 1 out of 2 adults. That’s a technology that wasn’t even around 5 years ago. So how can government leverage this technology to connect, engage and empower government employees and the general public? Tune in to find out with the DorobekINISDER LIVE panel on June 26th at noon ET. Register for the free online webinar now.

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