Results Act: Observations on the Office of Personnel Management's Fiscal
Year 2000 Annual Performance Plan (Letter Report, 07/30/1999,
GAO/GGD-99-125).

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Office of
Personnel Management's (OPM) fiscal year (FY) 2000 annual performance
plan.

GAO noted that: (1) past work done by others and GAO has documented poor
workforce planning in federal agencies that can hinder their movement
toward performance-based management; (2) major human capital challenges
are also emerging, such as the aging of the federal workforce, skills
imbalances that arose during downsizing, and a highly competitive market
for the kinds of talented employees federal agencies need to meet modern
demands for efficient and effective services; (3) because OPM is the
central management agency responsible for assisting the President and
agencies in managing the workforce, OPM's leadership will be critical to
addressing the government's human capital challenges; (4) OPM's FY 2000
annual performance plan provides a general picture of intended
performance across the agency; (5) GAO found that the plan's performance
goals address OPM's major programs and priorities; (6) however, OPM's
plan could have been more useful to decisionmakers in some areas, if it
contained cost-based performance measures to show how efficiently OPM
performs certain operations and activities, such as processing civil
service retirement payments; (7) OPM's annual performance plan includes
a general discussion of strategies and resources the agency will use to
achieve its goals; (8) for each of its goals, the plan discusses a
strategy for achieving that goal; (9) for example, the plan discusses
OPM's strategy to enhance its information security program by conducting
internal and external evaluations of its systems; (10) OPM's FY 2000
annual performance plan provides a fuller discussion of its performance
information than its FY 1999 annual performance plan but overall
provides limited confidence that agency performance information will be
credible; (11) although the plan discusses OPM's verification and
validation of its performance measures, the discussion does not always
provide assurance that the methods used will be reliable; (12) the plan
proposes using survey results of a sample of human resources specialists
as a key element in its measurement program, but the survey received
only a 29 percent response rate; (13) in general, the lower the response
rates the larger the uncertainty about the reliability and validity of
the survey results; and (14) overall, OPM's FY 2000 annual performance
plan represents a moderate improvement over the FY 1999 plan in that it
addresses a number of weaknesses that GAO identified in its assessment
of the FY 1999 plan.

--------------------------- Indexing Terms -----------------------------

 REPORTNUM:  GGD-99-125
     TITLE:  Results Act: Observations on the Office of Personnel
	     Management's Fiscal Year 2000 Annual Performance Plan
      DATE:  07/30/1999
   SUBJECT:  Performance measures
	     Personnel management
	     Human resources utilization
	     Agency missions
	     Strategic planning
	     Productivity in government
	     Data integrity
IDENTIFIER:  GPRA
	     Government Performance and Results Act

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United States General Accounting Office
GAO

GAO/GGD-99-125

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