Financial Management Performance
Phoenix has been USAID/Washington's core financial system since December 2000. Despite financial management improvements to date, USAID is still not substantially compliant with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act (FFMIA) of 1996. The primary deficiency is that USAID's Mission Accounting and Control System (MACS), a feeder system to Phoenix, does not support a general ledger. Substantial compliance will be achieved when Phoenix, which is Joint Financial Management Improvement Program (JFMIP)-compliant and meets federal regulations, is fully deployed to the field to replace MACS.
In August 2004, USAID completed the first round of overseas deployment with Phoenix becoming operational in five pilot missions. Based on the pilot experience, the Phoenix Overseas Deployment (POD) team sought and received agreement to modify the project schedule and timeline to accommodate changes in the data migration approach. The Phoenix deployment was accelerated to the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region in February 2005, and the upgrade of the web-version of Phoenix was pushed back to June 2005. Both of these milestones were completed on schedule and within budget.
As of July 2005, 22 missions successfully converted to the web-based version of Phoenix, including pilot (Colombia, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, and Peru), LAC (Bolivia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, and Nicaragua), and E&E missions (Armenia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Russia, and Serbia & Montenegro, and Ukraine). With adequate funding, we should have 75% of the missions online by the end of December 2005 and 100% by third quarter FY 2006. OMB and USAID expect that the complete rollout of the Phoenix system will address the remaining compliance issues that have kept the Agency at a red score under the President's Management Agenda (PMA). Therefore, the current target date for substantial compliance with FFMIA is third quarter FY 2006.
As a result of deploying the Phoenix system overseas, the Agency's Management Control Review Committee (MCRC), with agreement from the OIG, recently closed the Federal Managers Financial Integrity Act (FMFIA) material weakness with respect to our primary accounting system that had been an issue since 1988.
Another important requirement to "getting to green" is to ensure that the Phoenix system provides timely, reliable, and complete performance data on foreign assistance programs on a consistent basis. The Phoenix Reports Team has solicited users' suggestions for enhancements and requests for new reports. The Team's primary focus is to make improvements to the existing reports. They have also identified what appear to be the highest priority new reports and will begin to specify detailed requirements for this group of reports.
Impediments to "getting to green" include competing priorities and potential funding issues related to deploying Phoenix to the remaining overseas missions; providing ongoing support to the missions that already converted from MACS to Phoenix; coordinating operational logistics with the State Department to have State host Phoenix in Charleston, S.C.; and coordinating with the Joint Acquisition and Assistance Management System (JAAMS) and Procurement System Improvement Project (PSIP) teams, which are planning a web-based acquisition and assistance system.
It is critical for the Agency to enhance system capabilities by maintaining and improving procedures and systems in place. To develop and maintain relevant and timely reporting practices, including financial performance measures and accelerated year-end financial statement reporting, USAID has established a number of teams such as the PAR core team, the Financial Systems Integration (FSI) team, the Phoenix Reports team, the Accrual Reporting System (ARS) team, the Bureau Transition Coordinators (BTC) team, the Quick Hit Deobligation Follow-up team, and the Audit Management Team. There are also a number of working groups overseas led by the Chief Accountants and Controllers. These teams and working groups meet regularly and communicate with each other by sharing information via ad hoc meetings, email distribution lists, newsletters, and other media.
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