Financial Management Pennies From Heaven
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If you’re a federal manager with budgetary responsibility, you’re probably feeling the heat. From your left, the burgeoning needs of Social Security and Medicare will soon be burning into your agency’s discretionary budget. From your right, President Bush’s tax cut may melt your spending accounts. But within your existing budget, money you can use to meet your mission is waiting to bring you at least a small measure of relief, like a summer storm. Let it pass by, and tax dollars that could have been better spent will evaporate. Make the right moves and, like pennies from heaven, savings will rain down. Across government, civil servants who like to pinch pennies have learned the savings rain dance. Maintenance bosses, safety officers, mail managers, computer specialists, lawyers and procurement experts have learned how to make millions of dollars fall out of overhead budgets into program managers’ hands. “I’m always looking at ways to reduce the budget,” says Edward Sias, the mail manager at the Coast Guard. Like Sias, champions of efficiency across government are doing simple things to reduce wasteful spending. Their successes suggest that tens of millions of dollars in savings are available, if only federal managers would turn their umbrellas upside down. Check in the Mail For starters, a small fortune may be hiding in your agency’s mail-delivery system. Sias has been stamping out waste in the Coast Guard’s mail budget for five years. Using quarterly reports prepared by the U.S. Postal Service on agency mailings, he looks for inefficient or unnecessary mailings. In 1998, Sias discovered the Coast Guard sent 2 million recruiting brochures to high school students at the first class mail rate, racking up more than $1 million in postage. The following year, Sias took a trip from Washington to New York, where he helped the Coast Guard’s advertising agency redesign the mailing to take advantage of bulk mailing rates. Instead of costing 55 cents per brochure, the mailing went out for 17.5 cents per copy. The total cost: $330,000, a 69 percent savings over the previous year. Now, says Sias, “when anyone is going to produce a mailing, they coordinate with me to get the best rate.” More : govexec.com |