6.1: Planning, Budget, and Performance Assessment

Oversee a planning and budget process that clearly identifies the Board’s mission, results in concise plans for the effective accomplishment of operations, transmits to the staff the information needed to attain objectives efficiently, and allows the public to measure our accomplishments.

Other Information:

This objective will be pursued in part through the following actions: • In cooperation with individual divisions, review, evaluate, and revise as needed the Board’s objectives and goals developed during the 2006–07 planning process to prepare for the future. • Ensure that our goals, objectives, and implementing actions are made known to the Congress, the public, and Board staff. Prepare portions of the Annual Report and the Annual Report: Budget Review to be published on the Board’s public web site and forwarded to the Congress. • Ensure that the Board’s planning and budget process continues to incorporate voluntary compliance with the GPRA, with the expectation of achieving more streamlined operations and reducing administrative costs while maintaining Internal Board Support service levels. This may be achieved by revising procedures to eliminate unnecessary steps and by better automating remaining steps. • Provide management with information, data, and procedures to facilitate planning, budgeting, financial decision making, and procurement of goods and services, resulting in effective and efficient Board operations. • Utilize enhanced internal communications practices to promote information sharing, encourage effective management communications, and broaden awareness of goals and objectives. Discussion: Unlike the budgets of most other government agencies, the Board’s budget is not subject to the congressional appropriations process or to review by the administration through the Office of Management and Budget. Rather, the Board establishes its own budget formulation procedures, conducts strategic planning to identify changes to its critical activities and the proper amount and allocation of resources to support its mission, approves its budget, and provides various reports and budget testimony to the Congress. The Board, like the framers of the Federal Reserve Act, considers the continuance of its budgetary independence directly relevant to the Board’s independence in managing monetary policy. To maintain budgetary independence, the Board believes that it must demonstrate effective and efficient use of its financial resources. Resource management begins with a clear mission statement, identification of goals, and a review of factors that might affect the long-term attainment of the goals and of possible responses to those factors. With the establishment of objectives to attain those goals and identification of the resources needed to accomplish them, the Board develops the budget necessary to implement its strategic plan. In recent years there have been substantial increases in expenses for security, including the creation of an armed security force, enhancements to facilities to harden physical security, and investments in information security. While the bulk of these changes are now in our expense stream, they are causing significant investments of time by administrative staff, which was not increased to manage new functions.

Indicator(s):

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