One Agency Thinks IG Reports Don't Have to Be Boring

Inspector general reports aren't known for being riveting, but one office is trying to spice them up.

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR, monitors U.S. efforts to rebuild Afghanistan and the roughly $113 billion allocated for projects. To enhance its watchdog mission, SIGAR published a new "interactive" online report, in conjunction with its traditional PDF text document. The report, titled "Corruption in Conflict," dives into the U.S. experience with corruption in Afghanistan and is peppered with colorful photographs and charts. The agency wants users to click through to the sections they find interesting.

The mobile-friendly report, designed to attract a broader readership among the public and Congress, was one of several ideas SIGAR has considered. Another proposal was to regularly publish one-page summaries of IG reports.

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As far as Deputy IG Gene Aloise knows, SIGAR is the only agency to attempt to make its reports interactive, he told Nextgov. An in-house team constructed the report over about a month; since its publication, web users were 11 times the daily average, and page views were five times the daily average. This report was viewed 10 times as much as the next most popular report.

"Our main goal was to be as transparent as possible for the work we do," Aloise said, and to “convey a complicated message quickly and easily” users.

The biggest challenge, he said, was to "convince people this was an important way to show our product... What won us over is the argument that people read a lot of their information on their phone, and it's very difficult to read a PDF on your phone."

Still, it requires time and effort from internal staff to produce a highly visual report, so SIGAR is being selective about which ones it presents as interactive—for now, it'll focus on the "major reports with big messages."