From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: State's Foreign Assistance Act Compliance Description: The Department of State is responsible for reporting on their foreign funding allocations each year to Congress. But are they hitting their reporting deadline? Related GAO Work: GAO-19-600: Foreign Assistance: State Department Should Take Steps to Improve Timeliness of Required Budgetary Reporting Released: September 2019 [ Background Music ] [ Jason Bair: ] State Department needs take a variety of steps in order to improve the timeliness of this required budgetary reporting. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. I'm Jacques Arsenault. Last fiscal year the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, were responsible for more than $33 billion in foreign assistance funds. Along with that money, State is responsible for reporting to Congress every year funding allocations by country and category of assistance. This, by law, should happen within 30 days of Congress appropriating the foreign assistance funds. With me today is Jason Bair. He's an International Affairs and Trade Director at GAO. And we're going to talk about State's compliance with this reporting requirement of the Foreign Assistance Act. Thanks for joining me Jason. [ Jason Bair: ] It's nice to be here. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] Has State been providing the foreign assistance funds budget report to Congress within the time required by law? [ Jason Bair: ] The short answer is no. We look back over the last four fiscal years going back to FY15, and none of those reports have been submitted on time. As you alluded to, they're supposed to be submitted within 30 days of when Congress actually makes the appropriations. But what we found was those reports were submitted somewhere between 80 and 230 days after the deadline. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So that's well after the 30 days that's in the requirement. Has State said why they haven't been able to meet this deadline or why they haven't met the deadline? [ Jason Bair: ] So we had a number of conversations and reviewed a number of documents and they really highlighted a couple of things. One is it is really complicated. Even though foreign assistance accounts for about 1percent of the U.S. Federal Budget, it is still tens of billions of dollars every year. And there's a lot of complexity to it. Congress has a number of requirements and directives that they put on the foreign assistance funding for how it should be spent and what their expectations are about it. And that means that they have to do a lot of additional work and so they've designed a process unfortunately, which does not allow them to meet the 30-day requirement. The way that they designed it for FY18, it was designed, if everything went well to take 85 days. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So stepping back a little bit and looking at these foreign assistance funds in general, why is it important for State to get these annual reports to Congress? [ Jason Bair: ] So there are really a couple of reasons. First and foremost from a public policy perspective, the law dictates that Congress is to be provided this information within 30 days so that Congress can make sure that funds are being spent in the way that they intend them to be. But more from a kind of a procedural perspective and from a realism perspective, when these reports aren't done, it has delays on other parts of what the State Department does. So if the reports aren't done in a timely manner, then the funds aren't going to be distributed as quickly as they might like to be. And these are funds for things like global health programs, maternal and child healthcare issues, these are important to people in the real world. [ Background Music ] [ Jacques Arsenault: ] It sounds like for the past five fiscal years, State has been several months late providing Congress with a mandatory report on where and how federal assistance funds are being allocated. Jason, five years in a row, what has the response been from Congress? [ Jason Bair: ] So Congress certainly has expressed its displeasure in a variety of ways about not getting the information in a timely manner. The really most notable way is in this year's fiscal year appropriation for the Department of State and Foreign Operations, the House Appropriations Committee inserted some language, which said that the State Department wouldn't be able to spend funds for the Secretary of State to travel if the report wasn't provided on time. That provision hasn't been finally passed and enacted into law, but it certainly was a signal that Congress is taking this issue very seriously. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] So, in this report can you talk about the recommendations you have for State to get back on schedule for future reports? [ Jason Bair: ] So we had three recommendations. One of them did relate to some staffing issues that we identified. One of them related to some issues with the reliability of the data that the State Department was using, but the real primary recommendation is that the State Department needs to do a holistic and comprehensive review of its process for developing these reports. Because again, the process that they've designed in an ideal world wasn't going to be done within 30 days. So we've requested that they identify whether there are opportunities to make that process more efficient. And if the reality is that it can't be made more efficient, they need to go back to Congress and negotiate what's going to be a reasonable amount of time so that Congress can update the law. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] And finally, what would you say is the bottom line of this report? [ Jason Bair: ] The bottom of line of the report really is that the State Department needs to take a variety of steps in order to improve the timeliness of this required budgetary reporting. It's important for Congressional oversight and it's important to make sure that the funds are spent as quickly as possible. [ Jacques Arsenault: ] Jason Bair was talking about missed deadlines for a State Department requirement to provide Congress with an annual report on how they're allocating federal assistance funds. Thanks for your time, Jason. [ Jason Bair: ] Thank you. [ Background Music ] [ Jacques Arsenault: ] And thank you for listening to the Watchdog Report. 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