General Accounting Office (GAO)

The General Accounting Office is the audit, evaluation, and investigative arm of the U.S. government.

The GAO was created in 1921 as a result of the Budget and Accounting Act, and its “watchdog” role has evolved over the decades. The Budget and Accounting Act transferred auditing responsibilities, accounting, and claims functions from the Treasury Department to the new agency. The GAO was created because federal financial management was in disarray after World War I. Wartime spending had driven up the national debt, and Congress saw that it needed more information and better control over expenditures. The act made the GAO independent of the executive branch and gave it a broad mandate to investigate how federal dollars are spent. The act also required the president to prepare an annual budget for the federal government. Later legislation clarified or expanded the GAO's role, but the Budget and Accounting Act continues to serve as the basis for its operations.

The GAO exists to support Congress in meeting its Constitutional responsibilities and to help improve the performance and ensure the accountability of the federal government to the public. The GAO examines the use of public funds; evaluates federal programs and activities; and provides analyses, options, and recommendations to help Congress make policy and funding decisions. The GAO performs a range of oversight-, insight-, and foresight-related engagements, the vast majority of which are conducted in response to congressional mandates or requests. The GAO's engagements include evaluations of federal programs and performance, financial and management audits, policy analyses, legal opinions, bid protest adjudications, and investigations.

The GAO employs professionals who hold degrees in many academic disciplines, including accounting, [Page 168]law, engineering, public and business administration, economics, computer science, and the social and physical sciences. These professionals are arrayed in 13 research, audit, and evaluation teams. The teams are backed by staff offices and mission support units. About three quarters of the more than 3250 employees are based in Washington, DC; the rest are deployed in 11 field offices.

The GAO conducts its work within a particular sociopolitical climate and thus its focus changes from time to time. For example, in 2003, the focus was on the challenges that most urgently engaged the attention of Congress. Issues such as terrorism, Social Security and Medicare reform, the implementation of education legislation, human capital transformations at selected federal agencies, and the security of key government information systems were investigated to support congressional members and their staffs in developing new federal policies and programs and oversee ongoing ones.

The GAO has contributed substantially to the theory and practice of evaluation in the United States. Because it is the largest internal, independent evaluation unit in existence, its operations have contributed to an understanding of internal evaluation. The work of the GAO has also been instrumental in understanding evaluation utilization, as it must be defined to be accountable. In the past year, the GAO made 1950 recommendations to improve government operations, and four out of five recommendations made during the past 4 years have been implemented. A number of prominent evaluation theorists (for example, Nancy Kingsbury, Eleanor Chelimsky, Lois-Ellin Datta) have been employed by the GAO.

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