Brian Murrow

Previous to her experience with OMB, Ms. Danzig worked with the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and helped develop and lead its acclaimed HUDStat program. Prior to that, she led strategic planning for New York City’s housing programs. She has an MBA and is a former community organizer. She shares her four top tips on creating and using analytics, based on her combined experiences on data and analytics. They include: Tip 1: Choose Smart Goals. Performance management requires a commitment to the continuous improvement of best practices.

In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) faced a mountain of criticism. It was thought that the public health safety precautions built into its drug evaluation procedures in reaction to the Thalidomide tragedy two decades earlier were responsible for delaying consumers’ access to vital new drug therapies. Particularly in light of the growing activism around fighting AIDS, critics argued that the FDA procedures were born out of disaster and therefore extremely overcautious.

When Carter Hewgley joined FEMA in 2011, the organization was focused on two things, the timely delivery of services and the processes required to collect and organize all the resources to support those services. FEMA was a “disaster-driven” organization, more focused on responding to the next emergency, rather than reviewing the lessons learned from a previous emergency. Although there were “analytical cells” across the agency and programs, enterprise-level analytical capability was still at its infancy.

Mr. Silverman joined the IRS in 2011 to build an advanced analytics program.  The primary objectives for his analytics program are to reduce fraud and improper payments. His focus has been reducing Identity Theft and fraud in the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) program; reducing the tax gap (the difference between what is due from taxpayers and what is actually collected); and to identify improvements to core compliance challenges.

Mr. Silverman offers the following lessons when using analytics:

How do you measure and improve the performance of a group of people who see themselves as experts at what they do? This is the challenge that faced Gerald Ray, who set out to improve the performance of the Social Security Administration’s 1,500 administrative law judges in order to speed their decision-making process and improve the accuracy of their decisions. He set out to do this using analytic tools and targeted training sessions. An Interest in Analytics and Law. Mr. Ray’s interest in applying analytics to the law started when he attended law school.

The (SEC) protects investors, maintains fair and orderly markets, and facilitates capital formation. It is organized into five divisions, one of which is the Enforcement Division, where Ms. Walsh’s Center is housed. Ms. Walsh says , “the Enforcement Division’s mission is to pursue violations of securities laws and to try to get meaningful remedies, with significant deterrent value. So identify, pursue, and prevent violations of the securities laws.” The SEC has several analytics programs that are structured in a “hub and spoke system.” Ms.

The Recovery, Accountability, and Transparency Board (fondly known as RAT) was originally created by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) to provide transparency of ARRA-related funds and detect and prevent fraud, waste, and mismanagement of those funds. Later the RAT Board's authority was expanded to include oversight of all federal funding. Mr. Beltz has worked for the public sector for over three decades, mostly in law enforcement as a “detective and reconstructionist.” Mr.