Advancing the FM Vision with Action

The FM Vision is more than an idea. It’s a plan that focuses on the initiatives in Fiscal Service. These initiatives are about making things better for the American Citizen and YOU. Let’s talk about the "how."

Optimizing Disbursing is about invoicing and payments. It’s about processing payments for businesses and people. Electronic modern payment options are critical to improving federal disbursing. Automation saves time, money, accuracy, and security, and far more efficient cash control. Yes, we do use automatic payments. But we need to do more.

Currently, 12 CFO Act agencies use the Invoice Processing Platform (IPP). The IPP is life changing for vendors. Said one user. "IPP is great and easy way of submitting invoices to the government and payment is much quicker than submitting by mail. Quicker payments have positively impacted our Days Sale Outstanding (DSO). IPP is a very stress-free and a user-friendly business solution to get paid quicker by federal agencies. IPP is so easy that my grandmother could use it!"

We need more agencies to use IPP – and our goal will be for 17 CFO agencies to embrace IPP by 2021. That’s a 42% boost. We’re also pushing for fewer paper checks – turning another 40 million paper checks into electronic payments by 2020. And, we are aiming for 95% of federal payments to be disbursed from Treasury by 2021 – today, 87% of federal payments are Treasury-disbursed.

Transforming Collections calls for replacing old-fashioned lock boxes with more digital solutions. We plan to streamline two of the four lockbox networks by 2020. We’re also going to transform accounts receivable processing by expanding the use of the Centralized Receivables Service. The result will be greater efficiency and reduced delinquent debt. Our goal: One million receivables from 80 agencies processed through CRS by 2021 – last fiscal year, we sent out 70,000 invoices using CRS.

Strengthen Reporting is about using the G-Invoicing platform to provide a reliable system for recording and reporting on interagency actions so we’ll have a clean audit. Our goal is to cut buy/sell intragovernmental differences by 90% by 2022. We’re also exploring ways to help citizens get a solid grasp on where their hard-earned dollars are spent by expanding the use of USASpending.gov. By making data understandable and usable, we can help Americans understand "where we are" as a nation financially. At the heart of this effort is to provide one, single financial statement on behalf of the federal government.

Expanding Services calls for greater use of the Administrative Resource Center, which can replace small, duplicative services and allow more organizations to use up-to-date, cost-savings approaches to getting work done. We foresee government savings of $600 million through the greater use of shared financial management services by 2023. And finally, we’re finding ways to reduce government-wide improper payments by reaching out to other agencies and states to use our Do Not Pay Analytic Services.

Are all these goals a tall order? You bet they are. But we’ve proved that we can do it. Together, we can ensure that the FM Vision is a genuine, measurable improvement to federal financial management for generations to come.

Last modified 09/04/18