Managers play an important role in an organization; they implement policies from senior leadership and also carry concerns up the chain from staff to decision-makers. If managers and staff don’t see eye-to-eye on the key issues, then managers may be unable or unwilling to properly acknowledge and share staff concerns to leadership. Executives may be left unaware of what’s happening on the front lines, issuing policies that risk failure because they aren’t fully informed.

Improving the cost, quality, and performance of financial management operations and systems is one of the Obama’s administration’s top management priorities. While the financial management community has made significant progress over the years, it continues to face challenges in meeting some of the basic standards for accounting and reporting.

Transparency is one of the current buzzwords, which is notnecessarily bad. A keystone of democracy is accountabilityand transparency, i.e., providing information is one way forthe government to be accountable. Since no one wants tolook bad, transparency can be a major impetus for programimprovement.

The most effective way to access an agency’s accountability is with information about the performance of its programs: whether and how the agency is managing its resources to avoid waste, fraud, and abuse; the important amounts in its financial statements, their significance to the agency’s programs, whether and why these amounts have changed from the prior year; and conditions, trends, events, both existing today or likely in the future.