Featured Quote
"Under the Administration's Campaign to Cut Waste, we are scrutinizing every dollar of Federal spending to make sure that funds are spent efficiently and effectively. As part of the campaign, last fall, in Executive Order 13589, "Promoting Efficient Spending,"the President charged Federal agencies with tightening their belts to find efficiencies and savings in areas such as printing, fleet, and travel. That effort is paying off. Federal agencies are hard at work executing on plans to achieve administrative cost savings in these areas. Agencies achieved over $2 billion in reduced costs in the first quarter of 2012 compared to the same period of time in 2010, and we're announcing today that agencies achieved another $2 billion in savings in the second quarter."
-OMB Blog
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Tax Revenue Growth
Although property tax revenues are still lower than average, there has been a significant growth in income tax revenues. Withholding, a good indicator of personal income strength, has also increased for the ninth quarter in a row. Sales tax collection saw a 4.4% growth compared to last year. Corporate tax revenue continues to grow along with the Consumption of Durable Goods. All in all the slow but steady growth is not showing signs of stagnating allowing jurisdictions a sigh of reprieve. Tax Revenues Continue to Grow |
Digital Government
"The strategy leverages this progress while focusing on the next key priority area that requires government-wide action: innovating with less to deliver better digital services. It specifically draws upon the overall approach to increase return on IT investments, reduce waste and duplication, and improve the effectiveness of IT solutions defined in the Federal Shared Services Strategy."
Government 2.0 has been a long time in coming. With increasing use of smart phones and their amazing mobile applications it is difficult to deny the need for state and local governments to adapt. Due to the potentially very costly nature of this transition, the key will be proper planning to find the right balance between creating a sophisticated infrastructure and spending the whole bank.
The government's strategy has the right principles in mind to build an open structure that could easily allow innovators to utilize the government as a great source to drive digital business. Utilizing cloud and open source technology it promises a very appealing future where citizens can empower decision-makers to make the most popular choice, public employees can eliminate paperwork and local/state governments can share nation-wide networks. Whatever is finally decided, the important thing to remember will be that the long-term reduction in costs rather than the short term debts.
Please see the link below for the full report:
Building a Digital Platform To Serve America |
Performance-Driven Budgeting
In Michigan, performance measurement is being used to drive operational efficiency and cost cuts. To help budget better in certain areas, these performance measures are developed to track all types of things like trash collection, EMT response times, miles of roads paved or comparative employee wages. This data can be used to define activity-based costs to better gauge what level of service to provide.
To really benefit from all this data creation it is important to first create a program to best systematically analyze and act upon any the information you find. Without a formal system of performance-driven decision making, poor implementation might fall short of attaining the potential benefits including improved communication, efficient service provision and trusting citizens. Only after each jurisdiction takes the plunge to implement a data-drive culture can they better budget their service costs.
Please see the link below for the full report:
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Washington Report
For the latest federal news, the Washington report is available with regular update. You can access the most recent issue or the entire archive using the link below:
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