The National Science Foundation will officially go live with a new financial management system on Oct. 14. It did a soft launch Oct. 1 of a nearly three-year process to move off of a 30-year-old system. Martha Rubenstein, NSF’s Chief Financial Officer, said moving to a new system and maintaining NSF’s clean financial audit has been among her top priorities over the last few years.

“We followed all the OMB guidance and GAO requirements. I think we’ve done a really good job of doing exactly what supposedly the best practices are,” Rubenstein said during an interview on In Depth with Francis Rose. “We went out to a lot of agencies and looked for all their lessons learned. We spent multiple years cleaning up our data because we have decades and decades of financial data and people told us that was one of the biggest problems. If you don’t clean up your data and try to carry over too much, you make a big mess.”

Additionally, the implementation of any new system requires a culture change — especially among financial management — but also among nearly everyone in the agency.

“We’re in the throes of doing training now and we will not know how that comes about until we are up and running,” Rubenstein said. “NSF is fairly a small organization and hopefully the change, if it goes well, will be transparent to a lot of end-users because they will be using feeder systems to the financial system. We are still out there talking to everyone and have change champions in every organization. We’ve been spending the last year really making a major press to get people to understand what will be happening.”

Beyond her focus on this specific initiative, Rubenstein said many of her other priorities fall in line with what CFOs and deputy CFOs said they were working on in Federal News Radio’s annual exclusive CFO survey.

Federal News Radio surveyed 89 federal CFOs and deputy CFOs and received a 10 percent response rate. Most of the CFOs and deputy CFOs were from Cabinet or large agencies, and all were career employees.

This is the third year Federal News Radio has surveyed the CFO community. As part of our annual CXO coverage, we also survey agency CIOs, CHCOs and CAOs.

Budget, workforce continue as top priorities, challenges

Survey respondents said their top priorities and challenges are intertwined.

CFOs and deputy CFOs ranked hiring and retaining their workforce and finding efficiencies in their agencies in light of budget cuts as their top two priorities and challenges, by far.

Interestingly, though, CFO and deputy CFO respondents said inadequate technology was a close third in the challenges area.

The Office of Management and Budget is trying to address that technology area through the use of federal shared services. But a majority of CFOs and deputy CFOs surveyed said they are unlikely to move to a federal shared service provider in the next five years.

“Much more work needs to be done on standardization to allow out-of-the-box adoption of common systems,” wrote one survey respondent.

A majority of the CFOs and deputy CFOs surveyed said, however, that they agree with OMB’s decision to not let private sector companies offer financial shared services.

One commenter disagreed with OMB’s decision.

“Other than GSA and perhaps Treasury have service to other federal agencies as a core competency. Contracting with the private sector at least gives an agency tools to manage the relationship, focus on performance, and change providers if there are problems,” the respondent wrote.

More answers needed for shared services

Rubenstein said NSF was fairly far down the path of hiring an outside contractor to provide financial management services when OMB issued its federal-only edict.

“We are the last major agency to do their own financial system,” she said. “We are very interested in shared services. I think we will need at least a year to stabilize and go through a whole process of a whole year, and then we will be looking at particular aspects of financial processing and decide is there something we are able to go to a shared services provider for because it’s not our bread and butter, it’s not what we are interested really in spending our resources on.”

Rubenstein said the CFO community talks a lot about shared services, but there still are several questions out there that need answers.

“Are the providers in a position financially and technology-wise to bring on additional clientele? How are service standards being set? It’s, again, change management. It’s a mix of different issues that everyone is grappling with,” she said. “You need a success, somebody to step up to the plate, take another organization on and for that to be successful. They need to be transparent about how the costs are developed, what you are paying for, what you are getting and involving the clients really in deciding what the system will provide.”

Beyond shared services, Rubenstein, like many of her colleagues, said finding ways to be more efficient as her administrative budgets have been flat or declining.

“I spend a lot of my time thinking about, ‘How do I make sure we are overseeing our grants portfolio in a proper way with limited resources?'” she said. “It’s how do we do less with less. I’m not about ‘How do I do more with less?’ any longer. As continued mandatory requirements come down or do additional things, we are squeezing out things we want to be doing as well. It’s all about using risk management to prioritize what things you are going to invest in and take time to do, and what you will have to put aside even though you know you should be doing it.”

All the CFOs and deputy CFOs who responded to the survey said they are placing a big emphasis or some emphasis on risk management as it relates to financial management.

Risk management approach gaining traction

CFOs and deputy CFO respondents also said that non-financial managers don’t always understand the benefits of internal controls.

“They don’t always understand the complementary nature of their programmatic activities and the control environment,” one respondent commented.

Rubenstein said one way NSF is applying risk management is by doing a grassroots analysis of how the agency is to find and eliminate duplication of efforts.

“I tell people, ‘If you ever have a question about what the priority is, you just need to come and talk to me and I’ll make that decision for you, or help you make that decision and I’ll bear responsibility on what doesn’t get done,'” she said. “Then in managing up, I’m very clear with my bosses of the status of the major issues, what we are not going to do, why we aren’t going to do it and what the potential downfall of not doing it will be. But I’m not going to try to do everything that we are supposed to be doing.”

The idea of not doing everything came across in the survey, as well.

One commenter, when asked about what OMB could do to make your CFO organization more successful, answered, “Focus on a few deep priorities; implement in two groups: large agencies and small agencies to gain traction.”

Another respondent said, “Kudos to OMB for their collaborative approach. OMB should set goals/targets for their preferences, let us figure out how to meet those goals/targets, and hold us accountable for results. We know the more efficient paths to success better than they do.”

A third respondent said, “Working with agency CFOs, establish a government- wide vision/strategic plan for improving fed financial management. Ensure that any new requirements from OMB and Treasury are consistent with the strategic plan/roadmap and subjected to an independent cost-benefit analysis.”

As for what Congress could do to make CFO organizations more successful, respondents, by and large, answered: consistent and predictable funding.

“Congress could realize that resources are required to prevent waste, fraud and abuse. Rather than funding IGs to find it assign specific funds to prevent it,” one respondent wrote.

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