Before hiring a contractor to work on your home, it’s wise to make sure they are licensed, bonded and insured. It helps to protect you if the contractor doesn’t complete work properly, if there are any damages, or if workers are injured while at your home. For governments, it’s not just wise—it’s required by law.
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Almost every federal program, including new programs related to COVID-19 economic relief, has reporting requirements for recipients. That’s because federal granting agencies rely on your reports to ensure you are using funds to achieve program objectives and to make future funding decisions.
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It’s not uncommon for a government to have multiple bank or investment accounts with different staff or departments reconciling them. That’s okay, but keep in mind there can be risks when different people are involved with reconciling several accounts.
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This weekend marks the start of daylight saving time, and we all know the drill: Change your clock and the batteries in your smoke alarms. But how often are you testing your government’s backup file system? With the rapid rise in phishing and ransomware schemes, the biannual time change can also serve as a handy reminder to perform this critical task.
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In our “Power of a Problem” series, we’ve talked about how to identify and define a problem, measure the problem, and break large and complex problems into manageable process improvement projects. At first glance, these steps may seem to require a lot of effort, but failing to solve the right problem can be costly for your government’s pocketbook and morale. If you are a leader in your organization, you have the ability to create a culture that emphasizes solving the right problems the first time and empower others to do the same.
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There has been interest in audits of three Washington charter schools released Thursday, March 2. To make it easier to find these reports as a group, we have collected them on one page.
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Last week’s entry in our Power of a Problem series focused on simple measurements to help you define the problem. But as we pointed out, the more you know, the more you might begin to see a bigger problem. This week, we’re going to share techniques that we, as Lean specialists, use to help local governments break big problems into manageable pieces.
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Disbursing duplicate payments to vendors for the same goods or services can be costly for your government. According to industry experts, the number of duplicate payments organizations make ranges from .8 percent to 2 percent of their total payments. These percentages might seem small, but they can reflect thousands of dollars being paid to vendors in error.
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Last week, we shared tips on how to define a problem with a host of open-ended, descriptive questions designed to gather the facts you need to make others aware of the problem in order to build momentum for solving it. In this post, we introduce another tool you can use to define a problem: simple measurements. These are measurements we, as Lean specialists, often suggest that local governments gather before we embark on a process improvement project.
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Are you responsible for your county’s election processes? A new resource published by the State Auditor’s Office might be able to help you meet and exceed state requirements for ballot processing and voting. The booklet, Ballots & Voting: Resources for County Election Officials, compiles more than two dozen leading practices our Office identified during a recent performance audit.
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