We have in our statement the figures on this. The category entitled "Assistance to Congress" is one that has increased very sharply and represents now about 20 percent of our total professional effort.

In the area of what we call management reviews, these are areas where we decide to go in because either we know there is interest in the Congress in dealing with it, committees have authorization coming up for renewal 2 years from now in some piece of legislation, or where we see criticism of programs at hearings and so forth.

Mr. EVANS. These self-negotiated programs, could you call this the Peter being robbed to pay Paul, if Paul is the man-years you allocate to the Congress? Is this where you have taken your energy and efforts to service the Congress?

Mr. STAATS. That is essentially correct.

EXECUTIVE AGENCIES' REFUSAL TO SUPPLY RECORDS

Mr. EVANS. Are you under any executive constraints at all? Mr. STAATS. No. The only executive constraint we have is where we can't get hold of the records.

Mr. EVANS. That was going to be my next question. You mentioned the Internal Revenue Service. Except for that Service have you been refused information by the executive branch at any time in the last 2 or 3 years?

Mr. STAATS. We have had problems on specific data with agencies from time to time. This is particularly true with the State Department and Defense Department, areas they regard as sensitive, internal memorandums, documents of one type or another. I guess the answer has to be that we do have problems in some areas.

For the most part we try to negotiate them out but sometimes it takes a long time.

PRESIDENT'S REORGANIZATION PROPOSALS

Mr. EVANS. Are you currently requested to review and evaluate the President's reorganization proposals?

Mr. STAATS. Not formally, no. We have no obligation to do it. We have been giving some help to the Senate Government Operations Committee at their request to analyze background and so forth. We have not been called upon to make any formal report on this.

CAPABILITY OF GAO TO MEET INCREASED DEMANDS

Mr. EVANS. One final question, Mr. Chairman. With reorganization of the Congress, revenue sharing, and crisis in delivery of health care to the Nation, revamping of the welfare system, a lot of demands are going to be made on you this year and next year.

I hope the Congress takes enough time to know what it is doing as it faces these various questions. But if we are going to face them halfway intelligently, we are going to have to have a great deal of help from you.

I want to make sure, knowing these things are ahead of us, you feel you are in a position to produce. Are you asking for enough? Do you have the manpower? Do you have any problems?

Mr. STAATS. I would have to be very honest with you that we could use more. I say that in part because we have recruited most of our people out of colleges and until they have been with us a few years, they really can't be too productive.

While we have nearly 3,000 professional people, they are not 3,000 completely productive people in the sense of being senior people.

One of the reasons we have wanted to proceed as slowly as we have in increasing our staff is because we want to get good people and we want to be able to train these people and bring them along because we think over the long term we get more value out of bringing in able younger people out of college and training them on the job.

We are recruiting some senior people today, bringing in some people particularly where there is a speciality we need that we have not been recruiting for, such as a few engineers, for example. We have now an experienced actuary on our staff to look at the trust funds. He is the man that did most of the work on the United Mine Workers Pension Fund study.

Mr. EVANS. Is there any area of employment you are having difficulty with over others, where you have needs you have not been able to fill?

Mr. STAATS. We could use more actuarial help if we could get it. We could use more engineers if they were good engineers.

Mr. EVANS. I would think engineers would be readily available.

Mr. STAATS. But many of them have been so highly specialized they do not readily fiit into our organization. We can do better by getting an engineer right out of college and giving him some accounting and let him use his engineering background as part of an audit team.

Last year out of 450 people that were recruited out of colleges and universities, about half were accountants and the other half were from other disciplines-business administration, economics, statistics, industrial management and so on.

Mr. EVANS. Are you offering attractive salaries to get the caliber people you want?

Mr. STAATS. With respect to accountants and business administration majors, in spite of all of the difficulty people have getting big jobs, we have difficulty with the big schools. Out of smaller schools we can do all right. But a place like Harvard or Columbia or Stanford or the Wharton School, these colleges are still booked up by people who can pay a lot more money than we can.

Mr. EVANS. Is that a problem you are suffering from now?

Mr. STAATS. It hasn't been this last year. I think we have to honestly say last year we have had more strong candidates than we could hire and part of that is due, as I indicated this morning, to our turnover having practically dried up, and the other is that the market has been softer and more people have applied.

Mr. EVANS. Thank you very much.

Mr. ANDREWs. Mr. Bow.

Mr. Bow. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Staats, I am sorry I had to leave before you completed your testimony this morning. Unfortunately with the number of subcommittees we have operating I have been spread pretty thin. I appreciated your testimony. I think GAO is a great branch of the service

and has been of a great deal of benefit to the Government. I congratulate you and your staff for the fine work you have done.

If I had heard more of the testimony, I might have had more questions.

I have one thing that disturbs me a little bit, Mr. Staats. The Comptroller General puts out an annual report which is always interesting to me. I admit I haven't read this one completely yet. It would be helpful in our work with the subcommittee.

COMPILATION OF GAO DECISIONS RELATING TO LEGISLATION

You also make rules from time to time that are very important. I can remember some and some I don't.

Is there any possibility, is there any way that we could have precedents for the benefit of the Members of Congress?

For instance, we have Hind's and Cannon's precedents which are being brought up to date by the Parliamentarian. There are so many rulings you people make that could be of great benefit in our preparing of legislation, and in our work on the floor, but we have no place we can go for an index or a digest of the rulings made by the Comptroller General.

This might be an expensive thing to set up, but I think once it was set up it would not be too expensive to maintain.

There are certain areas that you people have made rulings in that are very important, but we are not familiar with them. I am sure most Members of Congress couldn't remember all of these rulings that have beeen made that might be necessary to have in our determination on writing of legislation, considering it on the floor and interpretation. Can this be done?

Mr. STAATS. You are thinking in terms of selected issues or problems?

Mr. Bow. Selected important findings.

Mr. STAATS. Such as impounding of funds, for example?

Mr. Bow. Yes. Such as the one I recall now, at one time when the Appropriations Committee appropriated more funds for foreign aid than we were authorized. The question was raised after the bill passed with more money than was authorized, and it was held by the Comptroller General that coming later was good law.

Mr. STAATS. Yes.

Mr. Bow. These are the kind of things that might be of importance to Members of Congress.

Mr. KELLER. If I could take a try at your question, Mr. Bow. We in the General Accounting Office have indexed and digested all of our decisions. I think it is something we could work out with the committee on the particular areas you are interested in.

Mr. Bow. I think where important findings have been made on matters of this kind, and then we could keep up to date a digest on your annual reports of findings you have made, whether it is in the report or not, decisions that have been made which affect legislation. I don't know whether other members of the committee agree with this or not.

Mr. ANDREWS. I think it would be very helpful.

Mr. Bow. I think their findings are just as important to us as the precedents of the House.

Mr. ANDREWS. At times maybe even more so to the members.

Mr. Bow. And some of the annotation. I wish you would make a study of that and sometime when you come back up here give us some idea and let us see if we might not fund it.

Mr. KELLER. Yes.

Mr. Bow. Would it run into a lot of money? This is the thing we are always concerned about.

Mr. KELLER. I don't think so because we have to do the work for our own purposes anyway. It would be a question of culling out particular items.

Mr. STAATS. This would be more a matter of selecting particular areas that would be of interest.

Mr. Bow. And the starting of a volume that could be a yearly volume.

Mr. KELLER. When we get a question, the first thing our attorneys do is look at our precedents.

Mr. Bow. It just seems to me that this would be a very helpful thing to us.

Mr. KELLER. It is certainly feasible.

Mr. STAATS. I don't know the best procedure to follow from this point, but we could start by suggesting a list of topics and then the committee could take a look at that and add topics or delete those of no particular interest.

Mr. Bow. And in the future keep them up to date.

Mr. STAATS. Yes.

Mr. Bow. The Parlamentarian is now working on updating and reprinting of the House precedents.

Whether that is necessary in your case or not I don't know. It seems to me you could do it in-shop.

Mr. KELLER. There is one system in existence at the present time, Mr. Bow, which is sponsored by the Air Force. It is called LITE. They have a number of matters in this system which is computerized including all of the Comptroller General's decisions from 1954 to the present time. That works by subject matter and word index.

Mr. Bow. At times you make decisions on contracts. It is difficult for me at times, when people come in with a contract problem and want me to consider it, to know just what the ruling of the Comptroller General might be.

You have made decisions and it would be helpful if we could turn to a digest of some kind and find out some guidelines.

Mr. DEMBLING. In connection with Government contracts, we have just issued a pamphlet which summarizes not only our own precedents but what the general law is in regard to Government contract principles, procedures, and practices.

What we have done is to consider each subject and summarized not only what the Comptroller General has ruled but what the courts have said on these topics.

Mr. Bow. This is something I have in mind in the general field rather than just on contracts.

That is all I have, Mr. Chairman. I thought this might be a good possibility.

Mr. ANDREWS. That is a good suggestion. I would like to see you explore Mr. Bow's suggestion and get in touch with the committee and let us know what you can come up with.

Mr. STAATS. We will be very happy too.

Mr. ANDREWS. Mr. Casey.

STUDY OF INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

Mr. CASEY. I want to ask one more que ion. I notice in your report at the close of the fiscal year, I presume fiscal year 1970, a study of the overall management of U.S. interests in international financial institutions had begun. Have you completed that yet?

Mr. STAATS. We have finished part of it. The part we haven't finished is that we are still trying to get a better story to tell the Congress on how the World Bank and Inter-American Bank are doing with respect to their own internal audit machinery.

As I mentioned this morning, the President has emphasized that his program was going to contemplate running more of U.S. assistance through these international organizations.

The thing that has concerned us is the absence of really very much capability on the part of the agencies concerned, in this case the Treasury, to ask questions about what these organizations were doing, how they were doing, and the absence of internal machinery within those international organizations to do a good audit job, the kind of audit we are doing in the GAO.

They both had a strictly financial type audit made by outside accounting firms. There is nothing wrong with this but it doesn't go far enough. No one is asking the question whether the program were being well managed or producing what they were supposed to produce.

As a result of the discussions so far, there has been now set up in both the Inter-American bank and in the World Bank internal audit staffs and an internal audit board made up of the members of the board of directors of both of those institutions. We are in the process now of trying to put together a report on this.

In the case of the Inter-American Bank, as a result of amendments enacted by the Congress about 4 years ago, we are asked to appraise the audit reports coming out of the Inter-American Bank. We have the first group of these now that we are in the process of preparing a report on to the Congress.

Mr. CASEY. These international organizations that we contribute heavily to take the position that since they are international organizations they don't have to report to or answer any question from a Member of Congress.

Of course, it was possibly small considering their overall monetary operation and the amount of money they handle. But I still don't like their attitude that they don't have to account for the country club they are building, it is none of our business. They just give minimal information as to what they are spending on it, where the money came from.

Mr. STAATS. We can't go beyond the records of the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department provides the U.S. Executive Director