Agency strategic plans describe where an organization wants to go. Oversight reports describe where it is struggling to get there. For a contractor trying to understand a customer, the second view is often more useful, because the problems auditors document are the problems program managers are under pressure to solve. Spring, when agencies are writing the requirements they intend to award in the fourth quarter, is a good time to read them.
The main sources
The Government Accountability Office is the investigative arm of Congress. It audits and evaluates federal programs, often at the request of congressional committees or under requirements in law, and it publishes most of its reports at gao.gov. Since 1990, GAO has maintained a High-Risk List of federal programs and operations that are especially vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse or mismanagement, or that need broad transformation. The list is updated every two years, at the start of each new Congress.
Inspectors general work inside individual agencies under the Inspector General Act of 1978, auditing and investigating their own organization’s programs. They report to Congress twice a year, and each also publishes an annual statement of the most serious management and performance challenges facing its agency. Reports from many offices of inspector general are collected at oversight.gov.
What to look for
- Recurring findings. When the same weakness appears in several reports over several years, the agency is likely still looking for help with it.
- Open recommendations. GAO and inspectors general track whether their recommendations have been implemented. An open recommendation is a problem the agency has agreed to fix and has not yet fixed.
- Agency responses. Most reports include the agency’s written comments. These show how leadership frames the problem and what it says it will do, often with target dates.
- Contract oversight findings. Reports on how an agency manages its own contracts reveal pain points such as weak surveillance, unclear requirements or turnover in contracting staff, all of which shape how solicitations are written.
Using what you learn, carefully
Oversight reports are public, and citing them shows that you understand the customer’s environment. Used well, they help you write a sharper sources sought response, ask better questions at an industry day and frame a technical approach around the risks the agency already knows it has.
Used poorly, they backfire. Do not lecture a program office about its own audit findings, and do not imply that your firm alone can fix a problem that a dozen reports have described. Agency staff often worked hard on the response to those findings. The right posture is respectful and specific: you have read the public record, you understand the challenge, and here is relevant experience that may help.
A simple routine
For each target agency, read the latest management challenges statement from its inspector general and search gao.gov for recent reports on the programs you support. Keep a one-page summary per agency listing the top issues, the related recommendations and the dates of the source reports. Refresh it twice a year. Over time this page becomes one of the most valuable documents in your capture files, and it takes only a few hours to build.