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GAO-20-497PR 1 (2020-04-20)

handle is hein.gao/gaobaeazz0001 and id is 1 raw text is: cAO U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Comptroller General Washington, DC 20548 of the United States April 20, 2020 The Honorable Wilbur L. Ross, Jr. Secretary of Commerce Department of Commerce Washington, D.C. 20230 Priority Open Recommendations: Department of Commerce Dear Mr. Ross: The purpose of this letter is to provide an update on the overall status of the U.S. Department of Commerce's (Commerce) implementation of GAO's recommendations and to call your continued personal attention to areas where open recommendations should be given high priority.1 In November 2019, we reported that, government-wide, 77 percent of our recommendations made 4 years ago were implemented.2 Commerce's recommendation implementation rate was 80 percent. As of March 2020, Commerce had 99 open recommendations. Fully implementing these open recommendations could significantly improve Commerce's operations. Since our April 23, 2019, letter, Commerce has implemented 8 of our 21 open priority recommendations. In doing so, Commerce has taken significant steps to improve the training of its field staff on how enumerators alert supervisors and managers to key information about certain field cases. It has also worked to ensure that forthcoming changes and decisions on enumerating populations that are hard-to-count are integrated with other hard-to-count related efforts across the Census Bureau's decentralized operations, and to finalize backup instructions for secure data transmission when the Bureau's contracted mobile carriers are unavailable. As a result of these efforts, Commerce improved its management of the census by better positioning itself to make informed decisions about trade-offs as it finalized its census design and anticipated and mitigated challenges. Commerce has 13 priority recommendations remaining from those we identified in our 2019 letter. We ask your continued attention on these remaining recommendations. We are adding 4 new recommendations as priorities this year related to the 2020 Decennial Census, and 3 new recommendations as priorities related to risk assessments ensuring the cybersecurity of the nation. This brings the total number of priority recommendations to 20. (See the enclosure for the list of these recommendations.) 1Priority recommendations are those that GAO believes warrant priority attention from heads of key departments or agencies. They are highlighted because, upon implementation, they may significantly improve government operations, for example, by realizing large dollar savings; eliminating mismanagement; or making progress toward addressing a high-risk or fragmentation, overlap, or duplication issue. 2GAO, Performance and Accountability Report: Fiscal Year 2019, GAO-20-1 SP (Washington, D.C.: Nov. 19, 2019). GAO-20-497PR Commerce Recommendations Page 1

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