U.S. Office of Personnel Management - Ensuring the Federal Government has an effective civilian workforce

2008 Presidential Award for Management Excellence

Department of Treasury

Expanded E-Government Innovative and Exemplary Practices

The U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) is responsible for the Nation's economic and financial systems. Treasury's Office of Performance Budgeting (OPB) manages the Department's budgetary process.

To address traditional problems in budgeting across a large department, OPB developed an integrated Budget Formulation and Execution Manager (BFEM). In the fall of 2006, the Budget Formulation and Execution Line of Business (BFE LoB) identified BFEM as the first - and so far only - application that could meet the critical infrastructure needs of the complex budgeting process. BFEM is a web accessible, shared service budget formulation and performance tracking solution available on a multi-agency basis. The Federal Government developed and owns the code upon which the system is based, enabling Treasury to share BFEM's benefits without incurring high implementation and licensing costs associated with commercial solutions.

BFEM is currently used by seven (7) agencies for an annual subscription cost of $100,000 to $300,000. Included in this fee are consulting services enabling agencies to customize BFEM to their unique organizational, budget allocation and document requirements. Onsite consultants provide training to agency staff - using a train-the-trainer model - assuring sustainable system administration without relying on future contractor support. The annual fee also covers general operations and maintenance of the system, help desk support, Web hosting services, and costs incurred by the Treasury Department for contract administration and oversight. Each agency pays an annual fee of $9,000 for hardware support, replacing the need for extensive hardware within the client agency.

By sharing operational and development costs among agencies, BFEM produces significant costs savings while improving the budgetary process. A product created by the Government for the Government, BFEM is a creative solution to the challenges in the Federal budgeting process.