The National Business Center (NBC) applauds the Intra-Governmental Transaction Exchange Portal (IGTE). IGTE, formally known as the Intra-Governmental Transaction Portal (IGTP), is an Integrated Acquisition Environment (IAE) E-Government initiative that supports the President's Management Agenda (PMA). This initiative is a major step toward the President's goal of an electronic solution and supports the PMA initiative for Improving Financial Management by providing a tool to remediate the intra-governmental elimination weakness as a barrier to our goal of a clean opinion on the U.S. Consolidated Financial Statements. It will also enable better and timely cost information. The IGTE pilot was implemented October 1, 2003. Five federal agencies are currently participating in the pilot, NBC and the US Geological Survey (USGS) for IT agreement transactions and bills, and the General Services Administration Public Buildings Service (GSA/PBS) and Patent and Trade Office (PTO) and National Science Foundation (NSF) for rent agreement transactions and bills. Over the last several months, many obligation and bill documents have been successfully transmitted, approved and paid via the IGTE Portal. The IAE Program Management Office within GSA and a Defense agency have also begun to process IT agreement transactions through IGTE.
NBC's participation in the pilot implementation revealed the human vulnerabilities that lead to financial elimination reconciliation issues and brought confirmation that the IGTE is a positive step toward the solution of "financial elimination nightmares". The IGTE requires that agencies create an obligation when an Inter-agency agreement (IA) is executed, and it allows the buyer point of contact to review and approve bills to ensure goods and services are received before bills are authorized for payment. The IGTE solution prevents lost "Inter-agency agreement" documents, lost association between "Inter-agency agreement" documents and obligating documents, transmission of incorrect obligation and accounting information, and it assures money is available before bills are issued and funds are transferred within IPAC. For NBC, the results of this pilot generated a great urgency and necessity to reach full implementation.
In July 2004, all federal agencies were scheduled to join the pilot agencies in sending all Information Technology (IT) and rent obligation and bill documents to the IGTE for obligation and billing approval and IPAC billing. OMB in May 2004 paused the project to perform a 120-day evaluation of the IGTE Portal to ensure an excellent production experience for all federal agencies. As with the implementation of any new system, there have been many great lessons learned and the outstanding end results of the pilot have overcome any initial perceived limitations. Because this new business process brings clarity and preciseness to inter-agency business transactions, NBC fully supports the vision of this IGTE electronic solution and is eager for its successful implementation within the federal government. Each Federal agency is encouraged to begin IGTE planning and to collaboratively join pilot agencies to form a synergism that quickly advances this project forward to successful completion.
For more information
Sharon Williams
Sharon_D_Williams@nbc.gov
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