Agencies review tens of thousands of financial disclosure forms from civil servants every year, here’s how 39 agencies have made things easier for their ethics offices
by Intelliworx
Every year ethics offices around the government face a time crunch during the financial disclosure period. That’s when lawyers and compliance officials sort through tens of thousands of disclosure forms submitted by civil servants looking for conflicts of interest.
While only the most senior government employees are typically required to do this, it still amounts to hundreds of thousands of forms. In the last six years, Intelliworx has helped 39 government ethics offices process more than half a million financial disclosure forms.
Why are we involved?
We built a software platform that not only digitizes financial disclosure forms (including OGE-450 and OGE-278) but also digitizes the entire process – from data collection to review and approval. That makes it easier for civil servants to properly disclose their holding on deadline – and helps small ethics offices manage the volume without sacrificing quality.
Below are a few of the tools – features within Intelliworx – that government ethics officers say help them the most.
1. Intelligent interview wizard
Many government forms have accompanying instructions on how to fill them out. These can be long and complicated. The interview wizard is a tried-and-true technique technology companies use for simplifying complex instructions.
It breaks down instructions into easy-to-follow steps. Intelligence refers to the fact the interview wizard ensures filers answer the questions completely and accurately – and eliminates questions they don’t need to bother with. In addition, the application will use the previous year’s data to prepopulate forms and streamline filing in subsequent years.
If you’ve ever used commercial tax software to file your taxes, you already have a sense of how this works. Tax filing is complicated, yet millions of everyday Americans can complete the process with just a little bit of help from software. We’ve proven the same is true with financial disclosure.
2. Upload a spreadsheet instead of retyping data
Owning shares in publicly traded companies is a common investment vehicle for anyone. Listing these stock holdings is a basic requirement of financial disclosure. For example, if a civil servant with influence over defense spending owns stock in a government contract, this is the type of issue ethics offices need to know about.
The challenge becomes evident when a civil servant owns many stocks. For years, they had to painstakingly retype their holdings onto a disclosure form in PDF form. The longer the list, the longer it took. Those who are required to fill out forms tend to be senior leaders with genuinely big jobs, and this is a tedious and error-prone process. It’s also entirely unnecessary.
Since most brokerages offer a way for clients to export their account data to a spreadsheet, we added a tool to upload a spreadsheet. The system instantly and accurately copies the data into the disclosure form. A process that could easily take a civil servant hours to complete now happens in seconds.
3. Helps ethics reviewers spot changes from year to year
We know from processing hundreds of thousands of financial disclosure forms that about 40% do not change from year to year. In other words, a civil servant may have the same stock holdings from last year but is still required to submit a new filing annually anyway.
Since Intelliworx pre-populates the form with the previous year’s data, it saves the filer a lot of time. Of course, they know what has and hasn’t changed in their holdings, but an ethics reviewer whom they’ve never met does not.
So, we added a tool that enables the ethics reviewers to see what’s changed in the new filing, so they can focus their attention there. If they’ve already signed off on a disclosure, there’s no need to review it again. The net effect is that the technology immediately reduces the ethics office workload by about 40%.
4. Metrics and reporting made easy
Under a paper process, if an agency’s Secretary asks their ethics office for a status report on financial disclosures, they will be hard-pressed to give an accurate report. Yet because Intelliworx has digitized not just the forms, but also the entire process, tabulating metrics is easy.
Leaders and individual contributors alike can see how many forms are still pending review, which ones are currently in review, and how many are completed. More importantly, if there is a bottleneck, they can see exactly where it exists – and correct it.
5. Supports additional and complementary disclosure forms
Financial disclosure is fundamentally a process of identifying and mitigating conflicts of interest. Yet financial holdings are only one aspect of possible conflicts. For example, if a civil servant held a board position with a defense contractor or was being flown around the country to attend events on behalf of the contractor, the ethics office needs to know about it.
As such, there are three other forms the federal government uses to check for conflicts, including:
- Widely attended gatherings (WAG);
- Outside positions or employment; and
- Travel reimbursement.
Intelliworx supports all of these forms within the same application.
6. More accurate and comprehensive visibility for better overall conflict review
Supporting multiple forms has a clear benefit but sometimes filers can game the system a little bit. For example, each form goes to a different lawyer in the ethics office. If one attorney denies a request for an outside position, a civil servant might be tempted to try again with another lawyer and see if they can get a “yes” to their request.
That’s a lot harder to do when the data is stored in a centralized disclosure system. The ethics office can easily see when a request was denied – and the rationale for it.
Systems like FDonline provided by Intelliworx bring industrial-grade transparency and accountability to the process.
7. Supports the government’s effort to improve its digital experience
The federal government has recently redoubled its effort to modernize its operations and deliver a better digital experience (DX). The automation and digitizing of the financial disclosure process, while internally focused, is aligned with this effort.
It simplifies the disclosure process for the filer and streamlines the conflict check for supervisors and ethics officers. Finally, it enables the government to refocus the time it would have spent on financial disclosure to deliver a better digital experience for its citizens.
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Intelliworx provides purpose-built software such as workflow, application management, financial disclosure, and automated digital forms to more than 30 federal government agencies. The company is a certified veteran-owned small business and is FedRAMP-authorized.
See it for yourself! Contact us for a no-obligation demo.
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