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Agricultural Conservation: USDA Should Improve Its Methods for Estimating Technical Assistance Costs

GAO-05-58 Published: Nov 30, 2004. Publicly Released: Jan 03, 2005.
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Highlights

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), working with state and local partners, provides landowners with technical assistance for multiple programs to plan and implement conservation measures that protect soil, water, and wildlife. For years, the Congress has been seeking detailed cost information on this assistance as it examined USDA budget requests. In part, because NRCS's financial system was not designed for estimating future budgets, in 1998 NRCS began developing additional cost data and a computer model for estimating future technical assistance costs. GAO was asked to (1) review NRCS's technical assistance cost estimates and (2) identify causes of any differences between the estimates and actual costs ultimately reported by NRCS.

Recommendations

Recommendations for Executive Action

Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of Agriculture To improve the accuracy, and therefore the usefulness of NRCS's program cost estimating, the Secretary of Agriculture direct the Chief of NRCS to clearly identify nonreimbursable costs incurred by NRCS's partners when presenting estimates of NRCS's costs, ensuring that its model's estimates are comparable with actual data.
Closed – Implemented
The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) data collection for the Activity Based Costing model was carried out in November 2006 and this exercise required each survey respondent to enter a discreet percentage for contributions to each task by affiliation. Affiliations included NGOs, Soil and Water Conservation Districts, and others.
Department of Agriculture To improve the accuracy, and therefore the usefulness of NRCS's program cost estimating, the Secretary of Agriculture direct the Chief of NRCS to change the assumptions used for developing time per task data for the model so that they better reflect actual work conditions.
Closed – Implemented
The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), in its data collection efforts eliminated certain assumptions such as a "fully trained staff" or for "complete vs. incomplete tasks" that had been used in its previous efforts. Instead, the agency asked respondents to enter the time to complete the task, based on the experience, issues, and customers for that specific location.
Department of Agriculture To improve the accuracy, and therefore the usefulness of NRCS's program cost estimating, the Secretary of Agriculture direct the Chief of NRCS to pilot test the feasibility of proposed changes in the development of the time per task data, including changes in development of typical work descriptions in several diverse areas of the country before proceeding with another nationwide workload analysis.
Closed – Implemented
The Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), as part of its 2006 data collection, allowed respondents to define a typical work unit for a job or practice, where the time estimate would vary significantly.

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Topics

Administrative costsAgricultural programsBudget outlaysComparative analysisComputer modelingConservationCost analysisFinancial managementFinancial management systemsFuture budget projectionsTechnical assistanceWork measurementConservation programsCost estimatesProgram costsWorkloads