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GCN Home > 10/09/06 issue

Program pays off (without interest)

GCN Agency Award | Tool automates paper invoicing system, resulting in fewer late payments and big savings for taxpayers

By Rob Thormeyer, GCN Staff

When work started backing up at the Interior Department’s GovWorks Federal Acquisition Center, project leaders felt the time was right to get on the e-government bandwagon.

The result was GovPay, a program that has hit all the e-government marks promoted by the Office of Management and Budget, reducing costs, improving performance and—most important—letting agency workers focus on their mission.

“The ability to use the Internet really adds value for the federal government,” said David Sutfin, assistant director for GovWorks. “That is what GovPay is all about.”

GovPay essentially revolutionized the way GovWorks does its business. As the Interior Department’s Franchise Fund, GovWorks services 870 civilian and defense clients, and more than 1,100 vendors.

From its inception, GovWorks relied on a paper-based invoice system for bill-paying. Vendors would submit invoices to GovWorks, which would turn them over to appropriate contracting officials, who would recommend payment.

As workloads increased, the paper system began breaking down. Interest payments piled up, and GovWorks was late in paying bills.

Sutfin estimated that GovWorks, a small shop to begin with, was using 32 employees—some federal, some contractors—just to do invoicing. On top of that, its agency customers in the United States and abroad had their own contracting officials who needed to be involved in the process, he said.

With such a large number of people searching through invoices and verifying contract performance, “you can imagine why many payments were being lost in the shuffle,” he said.

In fact, GovWorks’ payments to vendors were late 7 percent of the time, Sutfin said, which cost the government and, ultimately, the taxpayers, between $200,000 and $300,000 a year in interest payments.

It is no wonder, then, that the GovWorks team began looking for alternatives. “It was just taking too long to process those invoices on a paper-based system,” Sutfin said. “It dawned on us,” he added, somewhat facetiously, “that the Internet was out there.”

More news on related topics: Acquisition / Contracts, Business Process Management, E-Government, Management, IT Management, Web Strategies



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