Full Title: Nuclear Waste Cleanup: More Effective Oversight Is Needed to Help Ensure Better Project Outcomes
Author(s): U.S. Government Accountability Office
Publisher(s): U.S. Government Accountability Office
Publication Date: July 1, 2024
Full Text: Download Resource
Description (excerpt):
The Department of Energy (DOE) has a range of policies that seek to ensure it produces quality products and services, including capital asset projects. Further, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) uses several tools to oversee quality assurance on its capital asset projects. These include sharing lessons learned and using contractor data to monitor project performance.
GAO reviewed five selected EM capital asset projects and found that for three projects with cost overruns and schedule delays, officials did not use certain quality assurance oversight processes as intended. For example, two projects did not have consistently compliant Earned Value Management Systems. These systems help measure cost and schedule performance and can alert officials to problems. Conversely, GAO found that one project that was performing ahead of schedule and under budget had a consistently compliant system.