HHS supports strategies to sustain strong financial stewardship of resources. The Department continues to strengthen the financial management environment to prevent and mitigate deficiencies. HHS is focused on upholding accountability, transparency, and financial stewardship of HHS resources to ensure program integrity, effective internal controls, and payment accuracy. The Department is also building an enhanced financial management workforce that is better able to keep pace with changing contexts. Below is a selection of strategies HHS is implementing.
Contributing OpDivs and StaffDivs
All OpDivs and StaffDivs contribute to achievement of this objective.
Strategies
Continue to strengthen the financial management environment to prevent and mitigate deficiencies
- Leverage artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to improve quality and timeliness of key financial management business processes.
- Engage quality improvement principles to review key business processes and identify opportunities to manage risk and improve outcomes in areas such as financial management, grants management, and acquisitions.
- Build structures to continue transforming financial processes from manual to digital for faster, more accurate workflows at all levels of the organization.
- Facilitate continued collaboration across public and private sectors to adopt and advance nationally supported standards, implementation specifications, and certification criteria.
- Support the integrated business intelligence framework to provide complete, accurate, and timely information to stakeholders in real time.
- Promote the application of financial management policies and procedures to include best practices across HHS to ensure sound internal controls.
Uphold accountability, transparency, and financial stewardship of HHS resources to ensure program integrity, effective internal controls, and payment accuracy
- Implement governance structures to provide accurate and timely financial information that demonstrates HHS accountability to stakeholders and facilitates data-driven operational, budget, and policy decisions that enhance equity for all.
- Strengthen program integrity methods to better prevent fraudulent or improper payments by maintaining and improving oversight programs related to early detection and prevention.
- Invest in technical assistance, capacity-building, and burden reduction to strengthen program outcomes while ensuring program integrity, fiscal discipline, including helping grant recipients improve financial acumen, enterprise risk management, internal controls, and efficient operating policies and procedures to promote equitable access to financial assistance funding, while preventing fraud, waste, and abuse.
- Focus and prioritize audits (such as grantee single audits, Department financial audit, Office of the Inspector General and Government Accountability Office programmatic audits) to increase accountability of HHS programs.
- Define standards of excellence for the HHS financial community and implement a framework for measuring and monitoring success.
- Collaborate across HHS and the private sector to align health information technology investments and advance consensus-based nationally supported standards, implementation specifications, and health information technology certification criteria to improve interoperability of systems and the access, exchange, and use of electronic health information.
Build an enhanced financial management workforce able to keep pace with changing contexts
- Address financial management workforce infrastructure to focus on adaptations to new technologies and skill requirements, recruitment, and retention.
- Develop training strategies for financial management that improve the transfer of knowledge and sharing of best practices and process across HHS.
- Support financial analysis knowledge management by promoting an accessible repository of financial resources, directives, instructive documents, and standard operating procedures from across HHS.
- Strengthen communities of practice for the federal financial management workforce to improve capability, recruitment, retention, and succession planning across the enterprise.
