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Open Recommendations (97 total)

Private Pensions: Participants Need Better Information When Offered Lump Sums That Replace Their Lifetime Benefits

GAO-15-74
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury To provide participants with useful information and to provide for lump sums that are based on up-to-date assumptions, Treasury should review its regulations governing the information contained in relative value statements to ensure these statements provide a meaningful comparison of all benefit options, especially in instances where the loss of certain additional plan benefits may not be disclosed.
Open
Treasury generally agreed with this recommendation but did not provide specific comments on plans to address it. As of July 2023, Treasury has not implemented this recommendation.

International Development Association: Additional Information Sharing Could Enhance U.S. Treasury Oversight of Key Risks

GAO-22-104657
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury The Secretary of the Treasury should direct the U.S. Executive Director of IDA to work with the other Executive Directors to request additional information underlying IDA's loan loss model—including key assumptions of the model and sensitivity analyses of model results—necessary to conduct oversight of IDA's financial sustainability. (Recommendation 1)
Open
Treasury concurred with this recommendation in its official comment letter included as an appendix in GAO-22-104657, published in June 2022. As of January 2023, Treasury has sent a letter to congressional committees reiterating the agency's concurrence with this recommendation and indicating that Treasury has started taking actions to implement the recommendation. Treasury stated that it has engaged with the U.S. Executive Director's Office to request that IDA provide its Board of Directors more information on the model IDA uses to estimate the total risk it faces from borrower country defaults. Additionally, the agency indicated that it continues to discuss, with IDA management, IDA's financial sustainability. We will review information that IDA has shared with Treasury and update the recommendation implementation status as appropriate. As of May 2024, no further agency action had been taken.

Artificial Intelligence: Agencies Have Begun Implementation but Need to Complete Key Requirements

GAO-24-105980
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury The Secretary of the Treasury should ensure that the department updates its AI use case inventory to include all the required information, at minimum, and takes steps to ensure that the data in the inventory aligns with provided instructions. (Recommendation 27)
Open
When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Government Performance and Accountability: Tax Expenditures Represent a Substantial Federal Commitment and Need to Be Reexamined

GAO-05-690
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1 Open Recommendations
1 Priority
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury
Priority Rec.
To ensure that policymakers and the public have the necessary information to make informed decisions and to improve the progress toward exercising greater scrutiny of tax expenditures, the Director of OMB, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury, should develop and implement a framework for conducting performance reviews of tax expenditures. In developing the framework, the Director should (1) determine which agencies will have leadership responsibilities to review tax expenditures, how reviews will be coordinated among agencies with related responsibilities, and how to address the lack of credible performance information on tax expenditures; (2) set a schedule for conducting tax expenditure evaluations; (3) re-establish appropriate methods to test the overall evaluation framework and make improvements as experience is gained; and (4) to identify any additional resources that may be needed for tax expenditure reviews.
Open
Treasury did not submit comments on this report and deferred to OMB. OMB agreed that this recommendation had promise and also said that tax expenditure evaluations were the responsibility of Treasury, which had access to the necessary data. As of March 2024, the Director of OMB had not taken action to develop a framework for reviewing tax expenditure performance, as GAO recommended in June 1994 and again in September 2005. Since their initial efforts in 1997 and 1999 to outline a framework for evaluating tax expenditures and preliminary performance measures, OMB and the Department of the Treasury have ceased to make progress and retreated from setting a schedule for evaluating tax expenditures. The President's fiscal year 2012 budget stated that developing an evaluation framework is a significant challenge due to limited data availability and analytical constraints of isolating the effect of any single program. The administration planned to focus on addressing some of these challenges so it could work toward crosscutting analyses that examine tax expenditures alongside related spending programs. However, OMB and Treasury had not reported on progress on this recommendation since the President's fiscal year 2012 budget. As of March 2024, OMB said it does not plan to address this recommendation. Assessing the performance of tax expenditures is critically important given that many tax expenditures that function as entitlement programs do not compete openly in the annual budget process. Although revenue losses from tax expenditures exceed $1 trillion each year, many tax expenditures are not subject to congressional reauthorization, and therefore Congress does not have the opportunity to regularly review their effectiveness. Periodic reviews could help identify redundancies in related tax and spending programs and could help determine how well specific tax expenditures work to achieve their goals, as well as how their benefits and costs compare to those of programs with similar goals.

Information Management: Agencies Need to Streamline Electronic Services

GAO-23-105562
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury The Secretary of Treasury should establish a reasonable time frame for when the Department of the Treasury will be able to digitally accept access and consent forms from individuals who were properly identity proofed and authenticated and post access and consent forms on the department's privacy program website. (Recommendation 7)
Open
As of March 2024, Treasury reported that it is exploring options for an authentication solution that includes an option for Multi-Factor Authentication Phishing Resistance. The Treasury will update GAO once they have a timeframe for implementation.

Foreign Investment in the U.S.: Efforts to Mitigate National Security Risks Can Be Strengthened

GAO-24-107358
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury The Secretary of the Treasury, as CFIUS's chair, should work with member agencies to document a committee-wide process for periodically assessing the relevance of mitigation agreements and amending, phasing out, or terminating them when appropriate. (Recommendation 2)
Open
When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Information Technology: Departments Need to Improve Chief Information Officers' Review and Approval of IT Budgets

GAO-19-49
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury The Secretary of the Treasury should direct the department CIO to establish, for any OMB common baseline requirements that are related to IT budgeting that have been delegated, a plan that specifies the requirement being delegated, demonstrates how the CIO intends to retain accountability for the requirement, and ensures through quality assurance processes that the delegated official will execute such responsibilities with the appropriate level of rigor. (Recommendation 40)
Open
In its FITARA delegation plan, Treasury delegated four responsibilities to bureau CIOs: (1) Include the CIO in the planning and budgeting stages for programs that are fully or partially supported with IT resources, (2) Include the CIO as a member of governance boards that inform decisions regarding all IT resources, including component-level governance boards, (3) Ensure the CIO has reviewed and approved the major IT investments portion of the budget request, and (4) Ensure the CIO has reviewed whether the IT portfolio includes appropriate estimates of all IT resources included in the budget request. As of December 2023, Treasury's CIO has not yet established a plan that specifies how the CIO intends to retain accountability for these delegated responsibilities and quality assurance processes that ensure the delegated official will execute such responsibilities with the appropriate level of rigor. We will continue to monitor the department's progress in implementing our recommendation.

Federal Spending Transparency: Opportunities Exist to Further Improve the Information Available on USAspending.gov

GAO-22-104702
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury The Secretary of the Treasury should design and implement a process to periodically inform agencies about unlinked data to help agencies reconcile and resolve data linkage differences between transaction and submission data on USAspending.gov. (Recommendation 2)
Open
In December 2023, Treasury told us they have no updates on their progress to implement our recommendation. In July 2022, they told us they are working on a process to address this recommendation, including sending a quarterly report to agencies on the status of their unlinked awards and updating the functionality of the USASpending.gov Agency Submission Statistics Page (ASSP) so that it will allow agencies to quickly download a list of all unlinked awards. Fully implementing these new procedures will be responsive to our recommendation. We will continue to monitor Treasury's progress toward implementing this recommendation.

Cloud Security: Selected Agencies Need to Fully Implement Key Practices

GAO-23-105482
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury The Secretary of the Treasury should ensure that the agency fully implements the FedRAMP requirements, to include performing a review and risk analysis of the CSPs' FedRAMP security packages for its selected SaaS system 1. (Recommendation 32)
Open
In January 2024, we requested an update from the agency on its efforts to address our recommendation. However, as of February 2024, the agency has not provided an update. When we confirm what actions the agency has taken in response to this recommendation, we will provide updated information.

Private Pensions: Participants Need Better Information When Offered Lump Sums That Replace Their Lifetime Benefits

GAO-15-74
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1 Open Recommendations
Agency Affected Recommendation Status
Department of the Treasury To provide participants with useful information and to provide for lump sums that are based on up-to-date assumptions, Treasury should review the applicability and appropriateness of allowing sponsors to select a "lookback" interest rate for use in calculating lump sums associated with a lump sum window that can serve to advantage the interests of the sponsor.
Open
Treasury generally agreed with this recommendation but did not provide specific comments on plans to address it. As of July 2023, Treasury has not implemented this recommendation.
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