IAC gives awards to five projects for improvement

The Housing and Urban Development Department created its Enterprise Income Verification system to reuse data from the Social Security Administration and the Health and Human Services Department to establish a computer-matching program that verifies income and benefits information of low-income households.

As a result, HUD has reduced by 73 percent the overpayments to nonqualified tenants, amounting to $714 million, IAC said today in describing the project's effects.

The HUD system was one of five projects that the Industry Advisory Council named as its Exellence.gov awardees. The projects, chosen from 20 finalists, demonstrated improvement in their organizational performance through information technology to reduce costs, increase productivity and enhance management decision-making ability. The projects also influenced improvement on the Office of Management and Budget’s Program Assessment Rating Tool scores.

Robert Shea, OMB’s associate director for administration and government performance, praised the agency projects for their transformational change.

“I’ve never seen so many good examples listed in one place,” he told the IAC awards program. He also challenged agencies to share their best practices across government.

“This information needs to be translated in a way that will be useful to your peers throughout the federal government because while we hear about examples of waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government that are true, they’re not the whole picture,” Shea said. He urged the awardees to share how they accomplished their goals, to translate it into outcomes that are meaningful to the American people and provide instructions for each element that made the difference in a format that is most easily accessible to the widest audience.

The other awardees were:

• Business Gateway Initiative, Small Business Administration. Business.gov is the official business link to the federal government. It provides a single access point to government services and information for business
• Distributed Learning System, Department of the Army, Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems. This system is the Army’s Web-based training system available anytime, anywhere and consists of digital training facilities, Enterprise Management Center, Army Learning Management System, Army e-Learning and a Deployed Digital Training Campus under development.
• Medical Communications for Combat Casualty Care, Department of the Army, integrates, fields and supports a medical information management system so that its tactical medical forces can build a comprehensive and lifelong electronic medical record for service members. MC4 has helped capture 5 million electronic health records on the battlefield.
• USA Services, General Services Administration. This provides citizen access to government information and services through all delivery channels, through nine public Web sites, including USA.gov, a national contact center, training in government Web content management and online tools for content managers, a distribution center for government publications and intergovernmental leadership.