The Department's Bureau of Resource Management (RM), headed by the Assistant Secretary for Resource Management and Chief Financial Officer (CFO), employs over 500 people around the globe--in Washington, Charleston, South Carolina, and Bangkok, Thailand. With five major operating units, the CFO oversees all strategic and performance planning, State operations and foreign assistance budgeting and resource management, global accounting, disbursing and payroll, financial systems, and issuance of the financial statements and "annual report" of the Department. The CFO also coordinates and leads the remediation of vulnerabilities within the Department's global critical infrastructure. RM produces a number of essential documents including the Joint State/USAID Strategic Plan, Department Performance Plan, Performance and Accountability Report, Budget-in-Brief, and the Congressional Budget Justification Document.
RM's customers are all embassies, consulates, and missions overseas, nearly 40 other U.S. Government agencies overseas, all domestic bureaus and employees of the State Department, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors. RM's services to its customers are critical in order that they can do their job to create a more secure, democratic, and prosperous world.
| MISSION
"To integrate strategy, budgeting, and performance management, and secure and |
The CFO's mission statement is incorporated into the Department's strategic goal for Management and Organizational Excellence as Performance Goal 5. This Performance Goal has two initiatives, one each for the President's Management Agenda's initiatives for Improved Financial Performance and Budget and Performance Integration.
| INITIATIVE GOAL STATEMENT
Provide world-class financial services that support strategic decision-making, |
Improving financial performance means that the Department knows where every dollar comes from and where every dollar goes in a timely and accurate manner. Accurate and timely information is critical to managing our programs on a day-to-day basis, obtaining the best performance, and ensuring accountability to the American public. It is also a core competency of world-class organizations.
To do this, RM will:
Key measures of our success in this area are aligned with how OMB scores financial management related to achieving a "green" status rating on the President's Management Agenda. Other measures of success include:
During FY 2006, the Department satisfied all nine of the criteria and achieved and maintained a "Green" status score for improved financial performance.
| Criteria | Status |
|---|---|
| Receives an unqualified audit opinion on its annual financial statements. | Met |
| Meets financial statement reporting deadlines. | Met |
| Reports in its audited annual financial statements that its systems are in compliance with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act. | Met |
| Has no chronic or significant Anti- Deficiency Act Violations. | Met |
| Has no repeat material auditor-reported internal control weaknesses. | Met |
| Has no material non-compliance with laws or regulations. | Met |
| Has no material weaknesses or non-conformances reported under Section 2 and Section 4 of the Federal Managers' Financial Integrity Act that impact the agency's internal control over financial reporting or financial systems. | Met |
| Currently produces accurate and timely financial information that is used by management to inform decision-making and drive results in key areas of operations. | Met (Improved) |
| Is implementing a plan to continuously expand the scope of its routine data use to inform management decision-making in additional areas of operations. | Met (Improved) |
Customer service is the hallmark of the Bureau of Resource Management. As the Department moves to a single world-class financial system, RM has redoubled its emphasis on customer service and support. The Overseas Post Support Desk, in addition to helping posts with implementation of new financial systems and changes, has been expanded to become a state-of-the-art help desk for financial management professionals in the Department and in other agencies we service. As part of this effort, RM is moving the customer support function towards a 24/7 operation, leveraging our presence in time zones roughly equidistant around the globe (Charleston, Bangkok and Paris), and integrating former Washington-based operations into our customer support regime. For example, the former American Payroll Resolution Center is now operational in Charleston.
Establishing a worldwide cadre of qualified financial managers presents a difficult challenge to the CFO. Unlike most other Government agencies, the CFO must manage the dynamics of three personnel systems that include financial management personnel: Foreign Service, Civil Service and Foreign Service Nationals (FSNs). Our primary strategy is to maintain a vigorous and active training program for financial management practitioners. We view the training program as critical — in implementing new systems, establishing RM as the lead bureau within the Department on financial management issues, and also in ensuring that information in the field is current and authoritative. In 2006, the training program was strengthened to provide overseas customers a full line-up of training opportunities — offering over 100 separate courses, for a total of 1,600 training seats available in 14 different locations around the globe. Our training program enjoys customer approval ratings in excess of 90 percent.
Looking ahead, State will continue to achieve fundamental "compliance" results. Moving beyond compliance-based results, State management is making decisions based on meaningful financial information to achieve better performance results in the form of lower costs, improved efficiencies and/or improved outcomes for agency mission.
State will also undertake other value added activities that support effective strategic decision-making and mission performance. These activities include:
For the past two decades, the Department accounted for its resources through multiple outdated and disjointed legacy financial systems. Some posts effectively conducted operations through the integration of little more than a collection of Excel spreadsheets. Often, it could take up to 45 days after a financial event occurred for overseas financial data to update the Department's Central Financial Management System (CFMS).
The Global Financial Management System (GFMS) project integrates the Department's overseas and domestic financial operations onto common financial management software platform in Charleston. The GFMS program replaces the Department's 20-year-old overseas systems and legacy mainframe systems with modern open systems technology and COTS federally certified software. The platform will provide a single integrated view of financial data through data standardization, common business processes, and the seamless exchange of information through the Department's financial and administrative sectors. This will dramatically improve operations and reduce costs by eliminating system redundancies and replacing obsolete and unsupported financial systems. It will also provide the infrastructure for integrating other administrative activities within the Department, such as the Integrated Logistics Management System (ILMS).
The diagram below depicts the state of our financial systems at the beginning of FY 2003 and the end state of our global vision for the beginning of FY 2007 and beyond.
The following implementations will become the Department's Global Financial Management System.
RFMS is the new global accounting and disbursing system that has been implemented for posts around the world, and the building block of GFMS. RFMS is comprised of a commercial-off-the-shelf, accounting system for funds management, obligation, and voucher processing, and the RFMS/D disbursing system developed by the Department for Treasury disbursing services. The successful worldwide implementation of RFMS replaced the obsolete Paris Accounting and Disbursing system (mainframe-based) used at FSC Paris and the Overseas Financial Management System (Wang-based) used at FSCs Charleston and Bangkok. RFMS incorporates State's standard account structure and improves transaction standardization and timeliness between RFMS and CFMS, which results in the consistent, timely processing and recording of financial data on a worldwide basis. In addition, the overseas interface was reengineered for RFMS and now provides daily updates of overseas financial transactions to CFMS. These daily updates allow headquarters managers to ascertain the worldwide balance of our accounts on a daily basis, something never before possible.
In addition, RM enhanced its reporting tool called COAST which provides daily updates on all financial transactions to 168 posts overseas and domestic bureaus, allowing them to analyze, and "slice and dice" their financial data for local reporting purposes using modern reporting and query tools on their local workstation.
CFMS is the Department's primary and central accounting system in Washington. It is a mainframe-based COTS product that will be upgraded to the same COTS software used by RFMS software in FY 2007. Upon completion of this conversion, the Department will have in place a worldwide core financial management system on a common software platform.
Global Direct Connect will move posts that have operationally practical and reliable network connections (estimated at over 85 percent of our embassies) from their current batch processing environment to a real time, on line connection with GFMS. Currently, there are 59 posts using Global Direct Connect. Our plan is to implement another 39 more posts to Global Direct Connect by the end of FY 2007.
In FY 2004, the Administration asked agencies with the skills and capabilities to function as government-wide service providers in the area of Financial Management to submit business cases for doing so as part of the Fiscal Year 2006 budget process. After assessing potential service providers in several areas, including but not limited to past performance, current capabilities, and ability to operate a customer-focused organization, four agencies were designated Financial Management (FM) Line of Business (LoB) Service Centers.
Recognizing that the offerings of these four service providers were geared toward domestic operations, the Department prepared a FY08 Exhibit 300 business case as well as an accompanying proposal to become a service center of excellence for foreign affairs agencies. The Department welcomes this opportunity to continue to service the foreign affairs community and further the President's Management Agenda.
The Joint Financial Management System (JFMS) investment is a cooperative effort by the Department of State and the U.S Agency for International Development (USAID) to improve service and save money through collaboration on financial systems and functions. At issue was the pursuit of separate implementations of the same financial system software (CGI-AMS' Momentum) when a joint effort would improve efficiency based on economies of scale.
At the beginning of FY 2006, State and USAID achieved their goal of creating a common financial systems platform for State and USAID to manage financial management activities with the successful move of the USAID financial management system to the State Department's Charleston Financial Services Center. The JFMS investment combines the Department's Global Financial Management System (GFMS) and USAID Phoenix investments onto a common financial management platform.
The diagram below depicts the end (i.e. target) state of our global financial systems for FY 2007.
USAID and the Department of State are implementing a Joint Assistance Management System (JAMS). The system will collect assistance information and will interface with the Joint Financial Management System being implemented by the two agencies. JAMS will be based on a commercial product called "Grantium." Grantium was selected from a field of commercial products because of its ability to be easily configured for assistance processes. Other features include a robust reporting capability.
During FY 2006 significant progress was made on JAMS. Assistance processes were reconciled between State and USAID. A proof of concept was conducted with support from both domestic and field users of Grantium. The Grantium solution was presented to the government-wide Grants Executive Board which recommended continued development by USAID and State.
FY 2007 will see a second proof of concept to evaluate changes and upgrades resulting from the suggestions in the first session. Pilot deployments will begin in the fourth quarter, setting the stage for domestic rollout in FY 2008. State and USAID teams continue excellent collaboration on the Grantium effort.
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