From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Title: Opportunities for Government to Reduce Duplication & Save Tax Dollars Description: Audio interview by GAO staff with Patricia Dalton, GAO's Chief Operating Officer Related GAO Work: GAO-11-318SP: Opportunities to Reduce Potential Duplication in Government Programs, Save Tax Dollars, and Enhance Revenue Released on: March 1, 2011 [ Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the Government Accountability Office. It's March 1, 2011. In the current fiscal climate the government and the public are looking for ways to improve government efficiency and effectiveness. To this end, GAO's latest report explores opportunities to reduce potential duplication in government programs, save tax dollars, and enhance revenue. It identifies 34 areas of potential duplication, overlap, and fragmentation in federal programs and 47 areas where other types of cost savings or revenue enhancement could be achieved. GAO's Jeremy Cluchey sat down with Pat Dalton, the agency’s Chief Operating Officer, to learn more. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] What's the difference between duplication, overlap, and fragmentation, and how did your team identify the 34 areas laid out in the report? [ Pat Dalton: ] Duplication is a pretty tough standard to meet. Is it duplication of goals? Is it duplication of objectives? Client bases? So fragmentation overlap gets at some of those issues. Overlap--you might be having...serving a similar client base, similar objectives. When we're talking fragmentation, what that is, is different parts of the government are doing different pieces of the same function. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Could you talk about a few of the areas identified as being most at risk for a duplication, overlap, and fragmentation? [ Pat Dalton: ] Definitely. In our report we identify 34 areas of potential duplication, overlap, and fragmentation and it cuts across the entire government. I think all of the agencies of the government are touched at some point in this report from defense programs such as the defense medical commands, where we have a separate medical command in each service to some of our employment and training programs where we identified over 40 employment and training programs. So it's civilian, it's defense when you look at all of these programs together. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] Section 2 of the report covers 47 other areas with opportunities for additional cost savings or revenue enhancement. What sorts of programs fell into this category? [ Pat Dalton: ] They don't fall into the duplication, overlap, or fragmentation area. But in our current fiscal situation, they've provided other opportunities for potential cost savings or where revenue could be enhanced. For example, in revenue enhancements it can be as simple as--Can the IRS correct simple tax errors that a tax filer had made?--that are very obvious. They could be mathematical errors and speed along the tax adjudication process and the refund process that can actually save quite a bit of money. On the cost-savings side, it can be things like unused federal property--Do we need it? Is there a way to sell that property to get out of leases and save money? [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] You mentioned the current financial climate and obviously there's a lot of interest today in finding ways for the government to save money. Based on this report, how substantial would you say the opportunities are to do this by addressing the issues raised here? [ Pat Dalton: ] There's going to be some difficult decisions that need to be made to really reach the savings that are there, but there are significant savings potentials there. It's in the tens of billions of dollars, if not more. But, as I said, they're going to be some very hard decisions that will need to be made by both the executive branch and by the Congress. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] This reports clocks in at well over 300 pages in length and it addresses hundreds of federal programs taking place across the government. How did your team tackle this analysis? [ Pat Dalton: ] We began this work just about a year ago. So the first step was to look at our prior work and see what we could build upon. We also looked at what other parts of the government had done for ideas and began work in those areas. So that became the foundation of the report. We've identified 81 areas both on the duplication side as well as the cost-savings and revenue side. So there's quite a bit of information for people to start digging into and hopefully making some decisions that will lead to better government, more efficient government, as well as savings. As you mentioned, with the length of the report at about 350 pages, there are going to be areas that people are going to be particularly interested in but they're not gonna want to wade through 300-plus pages of report. They also can look at sections of the report, and through an e-reporting format, people can dig into the issues that they're most interested in and very quickly get down to the details of what we found and what we think are the next steps forward for each of the areas. [ Music ] [ Narrator: ] To learn more, visit GAO's Web site at GAO.gov and be sure to tune in to the next edition of GAO's Watchdog Report for more from the congressional watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.