So that's just a little of that. And you will notice the opinions expressed in this presentation are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the US Government Accountability Office. That's very important. All right.

Now this is going to be a challenge. So I thought we'd start with dessert

because it's always nice to start with something fun. When people say the Government Accountability Office is coming to visit you, there is terror in most federal agencies hearts. So I thought I'd start with a nice fluffy piece about GAO, which is this video. So I'm not sure how we get it to work.

Jerry, can you help? It's about two minutes long.

Your brother does not recognize. While he's messing around with that, I'll tell you a little bit about the librarians. So we're a very small team.

There are only seven of us, including me. And out of the seven, only five of us, including me, do research. So it's a really small amount. And when we go back to the graphic. You may have heard this. The Government Accountability Office report now. There we go.

You want it now? Yeah, we'll go right ahead. The Government Accountability Office report now says, according to a GAO report, when the Government Accountability Office looked into this a few days ago,

the counties were truly troubled. But do you know what we do? The Government Accountability Office is a nonpartisan watchdog that reports to Congress, often called the congressional watchdog, GAO is an independent, nonpartisan agency that helps Congress determine which government programs are working well and which are not. We make recommendations to Congress

or to executive branch agencies. Our work is fact-based and objective, examining federal programs, facilities, and policies. Congress wants the Government Accountability Office to keep an eye on that spending. We track government funds to see how much programs are costing, if the programs have met their goals, and whether federal money has been spent wisely. You give us the information

that really can make government more efficient, more effective, and accountable. Our work leads to laws and other changes that improve government operations, saving the government, taxpayers, billions of dollars. And the important thing is you provide information that is objective, that is fact-based, nonpartisan, fair, and balanced.

We're a fact-finding machine that returns more than $100 in savings for every dollar of our budget. Wherever the federal government is spending tax dollars, GAO is there. We do our work, including testifying before Congress, on topics as diverse as Navy shipbuilding, national cybersecurity, the Census, Medicaid and Medicare program integrity,

cutting-edge science and technology issues, nuclear security, homeland security, and healthcare for our nation's veterans. Our core values of accountability, integrity, and reliability are reflected in all of the work we do for Congress and the American people. Want to find out more? Follow us on Facebook.

Welcome to the company GAO. It's your coffee break with our expert. Follow us on Twitter. And subscribe to our podcast. For more from the Congressional Watchdog, the U.S. Government Accountability Office,

visit us at gao.gov. Okay, so you got the fluffy version. So we're gonna talk about the underpinnings, which is a little dry and boring. This slide just came out.

It's not, I have music to my presentation. I should've added that. All right, so this just recently came out.

It's not in the slides in your book. It's the one in your books from fiscal year 2017. This is on our website though, fiscal year 2018. The bottom row are the products. This is what we produced last year. The reports, GAO reports, that's the one I have circled. That's the one we're talking about today.

But we do do a lot of other things. You might notice bid protests. Those are the contracts when the contractors get mad and they say, you didn't issue this contract to the right person. So we navigate those as well. Legal decisions, lots and lots of legal decisions. Congressional testimonies.

So you can visit this slide there about our performance. You can get the report on how this determination is made. So the results up here, how much money we save, and how many recommendations. And those recommendations have to do with the reports. So out of the reports, we recommend stuff and then we track whether the agencies actually do it.

So that's important, those recommendations and improvements have to do with recommendations. So we are part of that as the librarians. We actually produce part of the great literature and that's what we are very excited about and we're very insistent as librarians that we are the producers,

not just the caretakers of great literature. So I'm going to pause here and just emphasize a couple things. So in fiscal year 2018, the GAO librarians conducted 219 literature searches and 54 background searches. So five of us and really mostly four of us

did all of that work in support of those 633 reports that were produced. I also want to emphasize our mission is to support the Congress. So we work for the legislative branch in meeting its constituent responsibilities and to help improve the performance and ensure the accountability of the federal government

for the benefit of the American people. And this last sentence is our absolute bread and butter. We provide Congress with timely information that is objective, fact-based, non-partisan, non-ideological, fair and balanced. You probably heard that five times on the video, but it is ingrained in us

that this is what we have to do. So this is part of our process of what we do. Okay, legislative. We're about the size of the Library of Congress staff, if you can kind of equate us, but we do actually, this was wrong,

we are in 11 locations. Maybe somebody thought one of those wasn't in a major city, but we won't quibble about that. So there's 11 outside locations and a headquarters in DC. There are 14 mission teams, we'll see that in a second. A lot of what we do, what I'm talking about today is the audit of the government programs and authority, authority is very important to us.

How do we do our work, why do we do our work? And this request by congressional committees or subcommittees, that's most of what we do is those requests. Often they're bipartisan, very interesting. But we also have mandates, public laws, committee reports, and occasionally Comptroller General

will undertake something usually that nobody would request. So it's not something that normally would be asked for, but we feel it's important to do. So organizationally, just so you have a sense of where we are, let me flip my notes here for a second. The librarians are in applied research and methods.

So applied research and methods. We are the people, you can see, I don't know, you probably can't read that, but there's things like contracting and defense and forensic audits and healthcare education, all kinds of good physical infrastructure,

all kinds of good stuff. But applied research and methods offers expertise, and these are our colleagues in cost analysis, engagement design, economics, data analysis, evaluation, and then library research and literature review, science, statistics, surveys, technology, engineering, and IT security.

So we are in this team of experts, and we're here to help all of the mission teams, 13 others of them, to produce these reports. So this is just a little bit of our bigger mission, direct support to the mission teams.

We are supporting all the stakeholders that are working on these engagements with literature searches and background searches. I will explain a little bit more about the literature search, background search, differentiation, and the literature reviews. Acquisitions, we buy a lot, a lot of stuff,

everything from ProQuest to data sets to Bloomberg Terminal, anybody use that, that's so fun. Interlibrary loans, we do high, high business of document delivery, because we're always looking for information to back up our research. Data reliability, let me see if I have

something exciting on that. We'll have a little bit more, the next slide is on this. Let me just show it to you. This is a slide by the librarians. We use this in teaching, so we like to talk about different levels of information. The bottom level is unknown, we don't know

where this thing comes from. We don't recommend anybody use it for any GAO work. The lowest level is authentic. This means that it was actually accessed from the internet source, it came directly from the source, and it declares to be the internet source, and the provenance can be verified.

So that's very important, authoritative. The internet source is official from an organization, public or private, or is recognized as a legitimate source for information on the subject matter. For instance, from GPO, we actually go get the hearings from GPO, because they are the official source,

and they are trusted. So we won't just get it from ProQuest, we will actually go out and get official sources, that's very important. Reliable, the information presented in the internet source is sufficiently unbiased and reasonably complete, timely and accurate with regards to the analyst's intended purposes.

As a result, it is associated with a low risk of analyst making incorrect or improper conclusions based on that information. And this is from GAGAS, Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards. These are our standards. Generally Accepted Government Auditing Standards, otherwise known as, for us, the yellow book.

It's a yellow book. That's, we're accountants, we like colors, yellow book. So this is, the reliable's what we're going for when we want a piece of information for our report. We will use these others as background information, but ideally we're going for that highest level of reliable.

All right, literature searches. So I'm going to go through, and this is really the heart of what I'm talking about here,

the literature search and literature review and background search. And I think I said something about this in the abstract. So a lot of times our searches start out with, we need a little bit of information on, and morph into, guess what? This is now going to support an objective. Sometimes they start that way.

They start to support the researchable question. That's what we call questions we're actually trying to answer in the report, the researchable question. But sometimes they don't. And in order to, we have a process which is outlined in various documents. And the guidance is down there. I'll read you a little bit of that EGLE guidance.

But we have various tools that we record things in. One is the record of research, which I'll show you. Another is sort of a middle software, Refworks. Many of you may know Refworks. So that is another tool we use. I won't show you that. Data collection instrument, I'll show you a data collection instrument,

and I'll show you an example of objective scope and methodology. So it's like going from different tools to what's the product, right? The EGLE guidance for us, it says, generally an engagement team conducts and documents sufficient review of existing literature or other appropriate research to assure themselves

that they understand the nature and background of the program or agency under review. Literature searches can provide contextual sophistication or can be the basis of a GAO product, such as an evaluation synthesis. That's our most exciting thing, is when we actually are of the basis of a GAO product.

So we have various internal guidance. Those are listed below. So here is the actual record of research. This is our tool. Some of you may have different tools. You may use LibAnswers or different things to get your research questions to you.

We use this very strict, kind of not very attractive, document, but it's full of instructions and it tells people how to fill it out and it asks them various information, whether they're doing background search, whether they're doing a literature search,

if we're trying to answer a researchable question, it gives them all that information. It spells out if, in fact, it is a researchable question, what that is. The team themselves views it to document any searching they've done. For instance, we request that they look at CRS reports,

old GAO reports, anything like that. They're supposed to document that in this document and we, of course, as librarians, there's a section for us to document everything we do. So within the record of research, I know you can't see this.

You're not supposed to see it. It's really, really kind of ugly. So we do, this is a dialogue search and this is very old. I purposely selected, actually the team selected, not me myself, something old because when we're currently doing research, we can't really show it until it's a record,

a GAO report. Another important thing to note about the record of research, it is our work paper. So we put this in our work file as part of the audit that this is how we've done the search and what you're seeing here is different search sets that we've used, the databases that we've used,

the different searches, the keywords, the Boolean connectors, the proximity, whatever the heck we've used, that's recorded in this, what looks very complicated. Sometimes it's a little less ugly than that but that's what it looks like.

This is, so we went from record of research, the problem, recording all the searches. We push generally, if possible, the results into RefWorks before we put it into the data collection instrument which is an Excel spreadsheet, often an Excel spreadsheet and in the Excel spreadsheet, there's the citation,

there's the abstract and then there's the analysis. And what's important to note about the analysis is that there's a set of criteria that have already been agreed on that you use to analyze all of the studies. So again, that objective, we're trying to look at this

through a certain lens and we try to be very transparent by saying this is our lens, this is how we're looking at this, this is how we're selecting these particular studies to use as a basis for our evidence. And this is just a snapshot to show you,

hey, guess what, that ugly spreadsheet turns into a report and it is evidence for what has been said. That particular searching is evidence in this particular GAO report from 2010. And it actually goes in there and in, this is last slide,

the objective scope and methodology is where we outline what we did in our literature search to do this review of literature and the studies we used and why we used them. So that's pretty much it and I'm the last one.

So I think I'll end a few minutes early if that's okay with everybody.