From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, www.gao.gov Transcript for: Comptroller General Testifies to U.S. Senate on GAO's 2017 Duplication Report Description: In his April 26, 2017, testimony to the U.S. Senate, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro introduces GAO's 2017 Duplication and Cost Savings Report. Related GAO Works: GAO-17-562T: Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: Opportunities to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits and GAO-17-491SP: 2017 Annual Report: Additional Opportunities to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits Released: April 2017 [First Screen] Senate Committeee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs [Second Screen] Government Efficiency and Effectiveness: Opportunities to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits [Third Screen] U.S. Comptroller General Gene L. Dodaro Opening Statement April 26, 2017 Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Good morning to you, Ranking Member Senator McCaskill, Senator Lankford, Senator Peters. It's a pleasure to be here. I appreciate very much the words that you've said complimenting GAO and I will make sure to pass it along to all the people in the agency. We have such a dedicated, talented work force and they deserve to hear such compliments. I also want to ensure this committee before I get into talking about this year's duplication report that I am worried about the overall fiscal health of the federal government. I issued a special report this past January basically saying that the federal government is on a long-term, unsustainable fiscal path. I called for an action plan by the Congress to deal with fiscal policy changes that are needed to be made. Now, while there need to be changes made in fiscal policy, both on the spending and revenue side particularly with entitlement programs, there are some things that can be done, and addressing overlap and duplication, improper payments and the tax gap are among those areas. This year, in our -- this is our seventh report on overlap, duplication and fragmentation. The -- we report on what's happened over the last 6 years with the 645 recommendations that we've made to- date, in the first 6 years. Fifty-one percent of those have been implemented by the Congress and the executive branch. Thirty-one percent have been partially addressed and 18 percent have not been addressed at all. As you point out Mr. Chairman, $75 billion is already accrued in savings, but there's another $61 billion in the pipeline that will be accrued because of actions that have been taken. So, the total amount of savings is $136 billion so far. Now, this year's report adds 79 new actions in 29 different areas that range across the federal government, from the Defense Department, it could save tens of millions of dollars by better managing their virtual training programs and integrating them and simple things like advertising for recruitment purposes, where there are seven different advertising programs competing in the same market, to hundreds of millions of dollars that could be saved in implementing our recommendations on Medicare and Medicaid, dealing with such things as providing not adequate compensation for uncompensated care that hospitals give. We think the formula is outdated and doesn't really reflect the true amount of uncompensated care, particularly since it's going down with the expansion of Medicaid, for example. Other areas where they could reduce improper payments in Medicare or Medicaid, we have a number of recommendations in that regard. Most of the improper payments of the $144 billion in the federal government come from Medicare, Medicaid and the earned income tax credit, so I'm glad we're addressing that today, and I'm glad Russell's here to talk about that issue, as well. So, with the new areas that we're adding, there are 395 open areas yet of GAO's recommended suggestions. Now, I'd recently met with OMB Director Mulvaney and I mentioned to him that we're going to be sending letters to each of the departments and agencies outlining our open recommendations and giving priority attention to those I think the head of the agency needs to pay personal attention to over the coming months, as I've done in the last two years. And, I think this will be particularly helpful as they go through their exercise of looking at, reorganizing, streamlining and gaining some more efficiencies in the federal government. Most of our open recommendations are addressed to the executive branch. But I also have what I call a Senator Lankford appendix to the testimony this year, where he asks every year, "What can the Congress do, give us a list?" So, we have 61 open matters for the Congress to consider. I would comment that most of the savings that have occurred to-date have come from Congress taking action. And most of our savings, there's tens of billions of dollars that are still on the table that can be implemented and successfully achieved by and through implementing our recommendations. So, I look forward to continuing to work with Congress and I look forward to continuing to work with the executive branch, which I'm committed to do. I'm in the process now of trying to meet all the new cabinet officials, talk about our working relationship and the recommendations that the GAO has to make their operations more effective and efficient. So, thank you again for the opportunity to be here today and I look forward to answering questions at the appropriate time.