This is the In Depth show blog. Here you can listen to the interviews, find more information about the guests on the show each day and links to additional resources.

Michael McBride — Supervisory Financial Analyst, IRS

When tax time approaches every year, there is a mad scramble to accountants for assistance to make sure finances are in order. But not everyone can afford that luxury and could put themselves in tax trouble without realizing it.

Enter Supervisory Financial Analyst Michael McBride of the Internal Revenue Service in Atlanta, Ga. He helped form partnerships between more than 4,000 organizations and nearly 90,000 volunteers to help make sure disadvantaged people file their taxes properly. This achievement has him competing against four others in the Citizen Services Medal Category for a Service to America Medal.

Click here to see all the Sammies nominees.

Themis Papageorge — Associate Clinical Professor, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University

Boredom, curiosity, or even revenge are reasons why a hacker could jump on a keyboard and steal data from your agency’s servers.

Themis Papageorge, of Northeastern University, has a list of three questions every agency should ask in order to analyze cyber threats.

They are: What do groups accomplish by hacking into agency networks? What can government do to prevent future breaches? And, is there any evidence terrorist networks, like al-Qaida could coordinate sophisticated cyber attacks?

This story is part of Federal News Radio’s daily Cybersecurity Update. For more cybersecurity news, click here.

Augustus Vogel — Associate Director for Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, Office of Naval Research

Combating piracy in international waters is truly a multinational effort. The navies of two dozen countries are involved in tracking down pirates in the Gulf of Aden alone. And the U.S. military wants to make their lives easier by giving them a set of software tools to fight piracy that can work on any nation’s systems.

The Pentagon just awarded a $1 million grant through the Office of Naval Research to build a set of platform-independent web apps. Dr. Augustus Vogel is the associate director for Latin America and Sub Saharan Africa in ONR’s Chile office. He joins In Depth to discuss the new tools.

This story is part of Federal News Radio’s daily DoD Report brought to you by United Health Military and Veterans Services. For more defense news, click here.

Chris Mihm — Manager Director for Strategic Issues, GAO

Last year’s update of the Government Performance and Results Act — GPRA — told the White House and federal agencies to get to work developing governmentwide policy goals that could improve the management and efficiency of not just individual agencies, but the entire government.

In the budget the Obama administration rolled out for next year, those crosscutting goals were put down on paper for the first time. The GPRA modernization also required the Government Accountability Office to issue a report card on progress toward those goals, which they’ve just done.

Chris Mihm, GAO’s managing director for strategic issues, joins In Depth to discuss GAO’s findings.

Thomas Mesenbourg — Deputy Director, U.S. Census Bureau

It’s been close to a year since the Census Bureau first announced an 18-month agenda to reorganize and realign its field offices across the nation — for the first time in five decades.

Census undertook the reorganization and realignment effort to save money and to keep pace with modern survey practices, the agency says.

Census last joined In Depth in March. Thomas Mesenbourg, the agency’s deputy director, provides another update on personnel changes, estimated cost-savings and lessons learned for other agencies.

2012 Management of Change Conference

In Depth host Francis Rose provided updates from the 2012 Management of Change conference.

• Click here to listen to Francis’ interview with Veterans Affairs Chief Information Officer Roger Baker.
• Click here to listen to Francis’ interview with the chief architect and chief technical officer of DoD’s Business Mission Area, Dennis Wisnosky.
• Click here to view Wisnosky’s presentation on semantic architecture.

GSA to launch $1.4B next-generation travel management system

TSP funds continue downward trend in May

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