Summary: Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Department of Agriculture's Targeted Export Assistance (TEA) program, focusing on the: (1) program's management, including the Foreign Agricultural Service's (FAS) documentation of its participant eligibility and funding allocation decisions; and (2) adequacy of the FAS evaluation process, how evaluations affect present and future funding allocations, and the commodities, activities, and geographical markets receiving TEA funds.
GAO found that: (1) FAS did not provide sufficient documentation for funding decisions, making it difficult to assess whether FAS applied funding criteria equitably and consistently; (2) FAS did not adequately solicit TEA applications at the onset of the program, which gave former or current participants in the Cooperator Market Development Program an advantage in applying for TEA funds; (3) FAS based most of its decisions on the TEA applications and not on the more detailed activity plans; (4) some TEA applications did not contain the necessary data for FAS to conduct in-depth marketing analyses of the proposed commodities and countries; (5) some participants did not have the opportunity to review TEA guideline changes; and (6) the tripling of TEA funding in the program's last 2 years would exacerbate management problems. GAO also found that: (1) contribution level and form requirements varied among participants, but FAS did not document the reasons for these variations; (2) participants did not adequately document the identities of third-party contributors and the methods used to derive their contribution levels; and (3) FAS did not closely monitor the nonprofit trade associations' administration of brand-identified promotion, resulting in some potential TEA participants not receiving timely program information. In addition, GAO found that FAS did not provide formal written guidelines on evaluation content, focus, cost, or characteristics of an acceptable third-party evaluator.
