Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO discussed the Bureau of Land Management's (BLM) Automated Land and Mineral Record System project, also known as the ALMRS/Modernization, focusing on: (1) the history of the project; (2) the results of GAO's reviews, including the key reasons for problems; and (3) where GAO believes BLM should go from here.

GAO noted that: (1) BLM spent over 15 years and estimates that it invested about $411 million planning and developing the ALMRS/Modernization, only to have the major software component--known as the ALMRS Initial Operating Capacity (IOC)--fail; (2) as a result of that failure, the bureau decided not to deploy ALMRS IOC at this time; (3) GAO has previously reported on the significant problems and risks that BLM has encountered; (4) GAO has made many recommendations to reduce those risks; however, BLM has been slow to implement some recommendations and has not yet fully implemented others; (5) BLM now needs to determine whether it can salvage any of the more than $67-million reported investment in ALMRS IOC software, by analyzing the software to determine if it can be cost-beneficially modified to meet BLM's needs; and (6) in addition, to reduce the risk that future efforts will result in similar failures, BLM should assess its information technology investment practices and systems acquisition capabilities.