Agriculture: NFC Moratorium

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO provided information on the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) National Finance Center (NFC), focusing on the: (1) reasons for the USDA moratorium on accepting additional agencies as customers for NFC; and (2) savings the Departments of the Treasury and Justice will realize by switching to the NFC payroll and personnel system. GAO noted that: (1) USDA imposed a cross-servicing moratorium so NFC could focus on redesigning its software and making user-requested system changes rather than servicing additional agencies; (2) Treasury estimated that it will spend $33.9 million less on payroll and personnel processing in fiscal years 1993 through 1995 by switching to the NFC payroll system; (3) Justice spent approximately $10 million to convert to the NFC payroll system and estimated that the cost to develop a new payroll and personnel system would have been about $30 million; and (4) the differences in the agencies' existing systems make it difficult to generalize expected NFC conversion costs and resulting savings.