Government Accountability Office

Introduction The Government Accountability Office is the United States agency that is involved in the financial and evaluative accountability of the Federal Government and provides the auditing and evaluation report to the United States Congress (Wallechinsky, 2015). The mission of the agency is providing the necessary support to Congress towards attaining its constitutional responsibilities, improving the performance and also ensuring accountability of the Federal Government with American people at heart. The agency ensures that it provides timely fact-based, objective and nonpartisan, fair, non-ideological and balanced information to the Congress (Wallechinsky, 2015). The core values of the agency includes integrity, accountability and
The first function is that the agency carries out the auditing and evaluation processes for federal programs. It holds the federal agencies and departments into account with regards to the various programs that are taking place in the country in the specific financial year (Kaiser, 2008). It then reports the findings to the Congress in order to view the necessary actions to be undertaken regarding these programs (Kaiser, 2008); for instance, it advises the Congress to increase allocation or conduct investigations regarding the programs. The agency also has the function of conducting special investigations of allegations regarding the violations associated to federal criminal law, especially the conflict of interest or sometimes procurement and contract fraud (Kaiser, 2008). The agency conducts these activities through small offices which ensure that it goes a notch higher with respect to the accountability process and has the mandate of being able to prosecute those involved in such fraud and other criminal activities related to federal
The events are organized depending on the current issues affecting the federal government and other public relation issues. The first issue is on the development of the skilled nursing facilities (Government Accountability Office, 2016). Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, abbreviated as CMS, an agency that is found in the Department of Health and Human Services that deals with provision of Medicare-has the responsibility of collecting and reporting data from expenditure reports from skilled nursing facilities, abbreviated as SNF (Government Accountability Office, 2016). However, the agency has not been able to make that data readily available to the public domain. Due to this challenge, the Government Accountability Office has taken the necessary measures to ensure that it is able to check on the accountability of the process. According to the agency, for each of the fiscal years 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014, direct and indirect cost of care were lower in terms of percentage of revenue for profit skilled nursing facilities as compared to non-profitable and government skilled nursing facilities (Government Accountability Office, 2016). The accountability agency is therefore tasked to keep tabs on the performance of the skilled nursing