WASHINGTON - Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Ranking Republican Sen. Fred Thompson, R-Tenn., Wednesday joined with Comptroller General David Walker to release the General Accounting Office’s biennial list of government programs and functions most vulnerable to waste, fraud and mismanagement.

Of the 26 items on the "high risk" list in 1999, five have been removed and two have been reduced on the 2001 list. One entirely new area has been added and an existing item has been expanded.

"I think it’s a substantial achievement to be able to say that five areas have been removed from the list this year," Lieberman said. "These problems are generally longstanding and deep-rooted, and therefore, require significant agency commitment, planning and effort to resolve. We look forward, at the beginning of this new Congress and this new Administration, to working with the GAO to position the federal government - in a management sense - to work effectively and with greater accountability in the 21^st century."

"The bad news is that we have made little progress in resolving the core management challenges that continue to plague the federal government," Thompson said. " We are seeing the same underlying government-wide problems on this list year after year - financial management, information technology management, and contract management. Eight of the programs we’re talking about have been on the high-risk list for a decade, and another eight have been on the list since at least 1995. It’s time for them to get off."

The GAO report, titled High Risk Series: An Update is part of the agency’s 2001 Performance and Accountability Series, a compilation of reports documenting management challenges facing most of the major departments and agencies.

GAO's "high-risk" list, which is announced at the start of each new Congress, is part of a decade-long project to draw attention to mismanagement problems that prevent the government from being as effective and accountable - and in some cases, cost-efficient - as it should be. GAO's previous high-risk list, issued in January 1999, included 26 federal program areas or functions. The 2001 list contains 22.

Removed from the 1999 list were:

Two areas included on the 1999 list have been narrowed. The first is Housing and Urban Development, whose Community Development program was taken off the list, leaving HUD’s two other major areas of concentration, the Single-family Mortgage Insurance program and its Rental Housing Assistance program. The IRS Tax Filing Fraud has been narrowed to focus only on the Earned Income Tax Credit. Expanded was the agency’s Collection of Unpaid Taxes program.

In addition to this updated high-risk report, GAO will release separate reports on the major management challenges and program risks that affect most of the major departments and agencies within the federal government and the U.S. Postal Service.

Chairman Joseph Lieberman