4.1: Financial Integrity, Management, and Internal Controls

Maintain and strengthen financial integrity and management and internal controls.

Other Information:

The Department must be a high-performing organization internally to achieve its national policy goals. From now through FY 2012, the Department will build upon a series of clean audit opinions to sustain high-quality financial oversight and identify and reduce risk in internal management activities. Achievement of targets on the measures in Table 14 will engender trust among Americans in the integrity of the Department’s financial activities, support informed management and policy decision-making, and help achieve the broader goal of leaving no child behind. Strategy 1. Implement risk mitigation activities to strengthen internal control and the quality of information used by managers. Beginning in FY 2007, the Department will build a database comprising internal controls and potential program and administrative risks. The Department’s principal offices will track their progress on various risk management components, making it possible to identify and correct problems quickly. Enhanced business intelligence will lead to better management decisions, improved cost efficiencies, and more rigorous internal controls. Strategy 2. Reengineer formula and discretionary grant management processes. The Department will analyze these processes to improve effectiveness and efficiency in awarding and monitoring grants. The Department aims for more balanced business workloads during the year, provision of more competitive grant funds to schools in advance of the school year, and better accounting for results in grants already awarded. Strategy 3. Comply with information security requirements. The Department will centralize information technology security operations to bring the agency’s security posture in compliance with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002. A security plan will be developed that focuses on designing and implementing a security architecture to complement the Department's Enterprise Architecture, ensuring that security controls are commensurate with the risk and magnitude of harm that may result from the loss, misuse, or unauthorized access to or modification of the system or its information.

Indicator(s):

Indicator:1

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