From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov

Transcript for: GAO: U.S. Comptroller General Testifies to U.S. Senate
on GAO's 2021 Duplication & Cost Savings Report

Description: In his May 12, 2021, testimony to the U.S. Senate, U.S.
Comptroller General Gene Dodaro introduces GAO's 2021 Duplication and
Cost Savings Report.  GAO's annual report on the federal government's
opportunities to reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and
achieve billions in financial benefits. 

Related GAO Works: GAO-21-544T, Government Efficiency and
Effectiveness: Opportunities to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and
Duplication and Achieve Billions in Financial Benefits, and
GAO-21-455SP, 2021 Annual Report: New Opportunities to Reduce
Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Billions in
Financial Benefits

Released: May 12th 2021

[Gene Dodaro:] I want to thank both of you for your legislative
proposals to advance implementation of our recommendations and to try to
prevent additional areas from becoming duplicative in the future. As
noted, chair in your opening remarks, the implementation of our
recommendation so far in the first nine years, we had over 900
recommendations. 57% of those have been fully implemented.

Another 22% partially implemented that's led to hundreds of billions of
dollars in financial benefits. As you point out. Importantly, however,
though, that number will grow, there's already been some additional
action on our recommendations that will grow by 10s of billions of
dollars. But there's 10s of billions of dollars yet in the offing that
can be achieved through implementation of our recommendations. This year
we have over 112 new.

Recommendations for consideration by the Congress and the Executive
branch. The first has to do with leveraging the government's enormous
potential purchasing power by pulling together to purchase common items,
medical supplies, office supplies, etc. There's been some progress in
this area, but there can be much, much more the result significant
savings in the information technology areas you mentioned. Senator Paul.

There's opportunities to eliminate duplicative IT contracts. There's
also opportunities in the IT arena to slim down the government's
multibillion dollar investment every year by consolidating systems that
help states run their Medicaid programs, and also to streamline computer
security requirements imposed by multiple agencies that are duplicative
on the states. There's also detracts from their ability to deal.

With very serious cybersecurity issues such as ransomware and other
things that they have to deal with on the revenue side, we make
recommendation IRS to better manage the fragmentation of its third party
information system. So these are very important systems, but there's
over 50 different systems they don't look at it comprehensively and we
think if they do that, an if Congress gives IRS the authority to correct
administrative errors.

And to also set requirements for unenrolled paid tax preparers, there
could be a significant dent in the 300 and over $50 billion annual tax
gap between taxes owed in taxes collected, thereby bringing in
legitimate revenue to the government without changing any of the tax
structures at all. Also, there are important findings in the public
health area. One was mentioned in terms of the infectious disease
modeling.

But also in research to deal with antibiotic resistance bacteria there
over 2.8 million types of infections where antibiotics haven't proven to
be work. You know work and you know over 35,000 people die a year and we
have recommendations to better streamline the research for these
activities as well as oversee the better. Oversee the over 2000 labs
that FDA has in terms of their.

Safety because they contain a lot of live virus.

Materials to do research with, so I'm very pleased to be here today. I
look forward to answering your questions and the questions of other
Members on the subcommittee, and I thank you again for your intensive
interest in this area. Your zeal center Paul. I appreciate that it's
chair ass and you 2 have provided great leadership and I look forward to
working with the subcommittee. Do it better advance these
recommendations and to make our government more efficient and effective.

So thank you very much.