The Treasury Department is using emerging technologies to streamline how agencies manage their finances in two projects launched Monday.
Both projects are being run by the Bureau of Fiscal Service‘s Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation with support from Deloitte and are expected to save the government millions of dollars annually.
The first project, Digital End-to-End Efficiency (DEEE), is focused on digitizing and automating entire business processes, rather than using robotic process automation (RPA) or artificial intelligence to expedite parts.
“DEEE shifts away from the current trend in automating individual tasks with RPA and looks at the entire process,” said Cindy Good, program manager at BFS, in the announcement. “We want to identify improvements using a suite of automation choices, if needed, to support a
seamless process.”
Two unnamed agencies have partnered with Treasury to apply the repeatable, scalable DEEE framework to billing and travel processes.
A second project, Blockchain for Grant Payments, continues a 2017 effort to have grant recipients use the technology to digitally represent, or tokenize, payments, as well as redeem or transfer them. Treasury plans to evaluate the functional and legal implications of using blockchain for grant payments for six months but predicts the technology will reduce costs and labor while improving internal controls and trust.
“By tokenizing relevant grant award information and combining it with grant payment information on the blockchain, we attain a new payment transparency that we couldn’t reach previously without significant and burdensome reporting,” said Craig Fischer, supervisory program manager at BFS.