Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of the Treasury's fiscal year (FY) 2000 performance plan that was submitted to Congress as required by the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, focusing on the: (1) usefulness of the agency's plan for decisionmaking; and (2) degree of improvement the agency's FY 2000 performance plan represents over the FY 1999 plan.

GAO noted that: (1) Treasury's FY 2000 performance plan, which is integrated with its budget justification, provides a limited picture of intended performance across the Department, a limited discussion of the strategies and resources it will use to achieve its goals, and limited confidence that its performance information will be credible; (2) Treasury's FY 2000 performance plan recognizes the weaknesses that GAO identified in its assessment of the FY 1999 performance plan and makes specific commitments or shows actual attempts to address those weaknesses; (3) however, real progress in not yet evident; (4) in reviewing Treasury's FY 2000 performance plan, GAO observed that the weaknesses in the FY 1999 plan generally applied to the FY 2000 plan as well; (5) for example, some measures in both plans were insufficient to adequately gauge progress toward meeting performance goals; (6) on the positive side, unlike the FY 1999 plan, the FY 2000 plan has a section that briefly describes departmentwide systems and capital investment programs; and (7) the FY 2000 plan also uses standard descriptions for assessing data accuracy across the Department.