On behalf of our agency, I am pleased to provide the fiscal year 2022 Agency Financial Report. The AFR represents the culmination of our financial management community’s efforts to accurately track and disclose our financial status, and to ensure that the agency continues to act as a good steward of public funds.
I would like to sincerely thank all of GSA’s financial services personnel for their dedication, diligence, and excellent work in compiling this report, as well as staff from across the agency who partner with the Office of the Chief Financial Officer to ensure agencywide accountability and transparency. In my short tenure as CFO, I have been impressed with our finance functions and commitment to adding value within the agency and across government, and to faithfully serving the American taxpayers. As the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic have waned during FY 2022, federal employees have returned to facilities, and the administration has achieved passage of multiple pieces of legislation, our mission has continued to evolve and become more complex. The finance, strategy, and performance functions within the OCFO have been at the “tip of the spear” in helping us rapidly realign and react to changing mission requirements. For all our OCFO staff who have worked so hard this year to provide agile and high-value service — thank you. I have complete confidence that OCFO is well positioned to continue serving as our agency’s trusted strategic and financial advisor in FY 2023, no matter what new challenges we face.
Audit and compliance
Our independent auditors identified a material weakness in the audit of our financial statements related to reimbursable activities in the Federal Buildings Fund and controls over certain manual journal entries.
We implemented multiple corrective measures in FY 2022 to address these findings. We corrected the error in our financial statements by recording adjustments to the applicable line items in the Statement of Budgetary Resources for fiscal years that ended on September 30, 2022 and 2021. We also reviewed large dollar transactions from the beginning of the fiscal year to mitigate the possibility of misstatement in the Consolidated and Consolidating Financial Statements.
The auditors did not identify any instances in which our financial management systems did not substantially comply with the requirements of the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996, and there was no reportable non-compliance with provisions of laws tested for FY 2022.
FY 2022 key accomplishments
In FY 2022, OCFO fulfilled our critical mission to lead enterprise performance and strategy at the agency. We enabled the agency to maintain compliance with the Government Performance and Results Act, and our subject matter experts led the development of GSA’s FY 2022-2026 Strategic Plan, FY 2021 Annual Performance Report, and FY 2023 Annual Performance Plan. Our unique vantage point at the intersection of finance, strategy, and performance, allowed us to fully support the our executive leadership team in defining a suite of new measures and initiatives that reflect the administration’s innovative and forward-looking priorities.
In addition to developing our foundational strategic and performance plans, we implemented multiple tactical initiatives in FY 2022 to enhance agencywide data analytics, a key input to improving management and strategic decision-making.
- Our Analytics Community of Practice grew to nearly 300 practitioners across the agency in FY 2022, facilitated over 40 educational events, and worked to upskill our workforce in competencies including data scripting, analytics, and reporting.
- We launched a series of new dashboarding tools in FY 2022 to assess and display data related to human capital, budget execution, and business line performance. In addition to providing strategic insights, these automated tools saved practitioners significant work in manually processing and reporting data.
- We kicked off a broad-scale Financial Data Environment Modernization effort in FY 2022 to consolidate financial data into a single cloud environment with critical reporting, analytics, and visualization tools. The successful completion of this multi-year initiative will reduce duplication of efforts, enhance analytics capabilities, and better integrate financial and business data.
Not only was our workforce highly engaged in FY 2022, they also delivered excellent customer service and operational performance for the agency. Our supervisors put in the extra effort to maintain OCFO’s carefully cultivated culture of high performance and high engagement, as evidenced by our continued strong scores in the FY 2021 Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey—leading to a 17th place finish out of 432 agency sub-components in the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work in the Federal Government. Recent pulse survey results confirm the long-term trends identified in FEVS, as 92% of OCFO staff identified they were satisfied working in OCFO’s hybrid work environment.
Since launching the Eliminate, Optimize and Automate initiative in OCFO in FY 2019, we have focused on continuously improving and automating business processes and activities. To date, this program has identified and fully deployed over 120 robotic process automation applications at GSA, creating significant workload savings. FY 2022 was another year of great success for the OCFO EOA program, which saw the launch of multiple key initiatives and improvement interventions:
- We acquired and implemented a new intelligent automation document capture software to complement existing RPA services. In a pilot use case, this new artificial intelligence technology is identifying specific contract elements in over 8,000 federal leases, to be used with implementation of the upcoming federal lease accounting standard in FY 2024. In total, the AI tool will review over 600,000 pages of lease documents, identify missing fields, and help our employees expedite a tedious, and previously manual task.
- We improved the reimbursable work authorization reconciliation process resulting in the closing of over 840 completed RWAs, and permitting customer agencies to deobligate over $27 million.
- We completed the requirements definition and implementation planning for bringing a new budget system, OneStream, online in FY 2023 to manage the FY 2025 Formulation Process. The new enterprise budget system will create one system of record, consolidate previously disparate data systems and budget formulation processes, and generate GSA-wide efficiencies.
OCFO staff successfully adapted to challenging working conditions in FY 2022, and made it another year of high performance for our agency. We demonstrated our resilience, our commitment to generating value for our agencywide and governmentwide partners, and our dedication to keeping OCFO an engaging place to work. I feel great confidence and anticipation, as I look to FY 2023, that together the OCFO team will deliver even greater service.
Sincerely,
Nimisha Agarwal
Chief Financial Officer
Nov. 14, 2022
U.S. General Services Administration
