Summary: Despite growing demands on GAO by Congress and the public, the GAO staff has remained relatively stable in recent years. As a result, much emphasis has been placed on GAO strategic program planning as well as its planning of individual audits or studies. In accordance with this emphasis, GAO was reorganized in 1972 into 12 divisions responsible for specific functions or programs, and in 1975 an "issue area" planning and programming system was created to insure that Government-wide issues of current national importance are continuously identified and reviewed for audit coverage. Each issue area is assigned to a GAO division which is generally responsible for conducting audits of those agencies and programs most directly related to the issue area. Within each issue area are lines of effort which contain a series of proposed jobs that are either underway or planned to start during the period covered by the issue plan. The success of the issue area planning system is measured by the extent to which it allows GAO to make sure that the individual audits conducted are the most important ones. The audits generally have: a survey stage in which potential problems and issues are identified; a review stage for more detailed examination; and a reporting stage which includes recommendations for improvement. Each stage is represented by a phase of the job planning approach, which is intended to evaluate the worth of an audit before it is started or proceeds to the next stage, and decisions can be made before resources are committed to an audit. The five phases are: the proposal, scoping, planning, implementation, and evaluation. By the end of the implementation phase, the audit team has developed and communicated the issues and the job is completed. The final phase, evaluation, is to assess the results of the job, as well as the performance of the audit team members in order to provide feedback for improving future job plans.
