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GAO-22-104541 1 (2022-07-25)

handle is hein.gao/gaonnb0001 and id is 1 raw text is: AO U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Washington, DC 20548 July 25, 2022 Congressional Committees Financial Management: DOE and NNSA Have Opportunities to Improve Management of Carryover Balances Congress appropriates funds to the Department of Energy (DOE) every fiscal year to provide new authority to enter into financial obligations that will result in immediate or future outlays of federal funds to achieve desired missions, and many of these funds may be carried over from year to year.1 These funds support various DOE missions, including those of its Office of Environmental Management (EM) and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversee the cleanup of DOE's legacy sites and the operation of the nuclear security enterprise, respectively. Specifically, EM has a mission to clean up radioactive and hazardous contamination produced by more than five decades of nuclear energy and weapons production and research. NNSA has missions to maintain and modernize the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and to lead and support nuclear nonproliferation efforts. EM and NNSA rely on and oversee management and operating (M&O) contractors to execute these agencies' missions.2 A majority of the funds appropriated to EM and NNSA to support their missions remain available for obligation until they are expended, or costed.3 Appropriated funds that remain available indefinitely are commonly referred to as no-year funds.4 With no-year funding authority, EM 1An agency's obligational authority is the sum of (1) budget authority enacted for a given fiscal year, (2) unobligated balances of amounts that have not expired brought forward from prior years, (3) amounts of offsetting collections to be credited and available to specific funds or accounts during that year, and (4) budget authority transferred from other funds or accounts. The balance of obligational authority is an amount carried over from one year to the next if the budget authority is available for obligation in the next fiscal year. Not all obligational authority that becomes available in a fiscal year is obligated and paid out in that same year. Balances are described as (1) obligated, (2) unobligated, or (3) unexpended. An outlay is the issuance of checks, disbursement of cash, or electronic transfer of funds made to liquidate a federal obligation. GAO, A Glossary of Terms Used in the Federal Budget Process, GAO- 05-734SP (Washington, D.C.: September 2005). 2M&O contracts are agreements under which the government contracts for the operation, maintenance, or support, on its behalf, of a government-owned or government-controlled research, development, special production, or testing establishment wholly or principally devoted to one or more of the major programs of the contracting federal agency. 48 C.F.R. § 17.601. 3The terms expended and costed are often used interchangeably by DOE and NNSA and are used interchangeably in instances in this report. However, there are minor technical differences. Expenditures, or outlays, refer to when an obligation is actually liquidated through issuance of a check, electronic transfer of funds, or disbursement of cash. An obligation is considered costed after the invoice for work has been received, the work has been completed to government satisfaction, and/or the invoice is approved for payment. Costs can also include accruals, which are DOE's estimates of work performed during a period but for which an invoice has not been received. 41n a May 2018 communication to the House of Representatives Joint Select Committee on Budget and Appropriations Process Reform, the Congressional Budget Office reported that approximately 92 percent of DOE's GAO-22-104541 DOE and NNSA Carryover Balances Page 1

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