Legislative Branch Appropriations for 2005

increase for staff who are not senior analysts or managers, along with merit and other pay increases for all staff.

CBO also expects to complete its first audit in 2004. The agency has worked closely with Kearney and Company, the auditing firm, and will embark on several initiatives to address specific areas and improve future audits. Those include implementing a more comprehensive property management system and developing more formal documentation of procedures in certain areas.

In fiscal year 2005, CBO's request will allow the agency to build on current efforts-specifically:

Support a workload estimated at 2,120 legislative and mandate cost estimates, 82 major analytical reports (11 percent more than in 2003, which itself represented a 76 percent increase over 2002), 74 other publications, and a heavy schedule of Congressional testimony;

Support 235 FTEs, the same number as in 2004, including an across-the-board pay adjustment of 3.5 percent for staff earning a salary of $100,000 or less, consistent with the pay adjustment requested by other legislative branch agencies, along with a projected benefits increase of 7.0 percent;

Fund a combination of promotions and merit increases for all staff, including those whose salary exceeds $100,000 and who do not receive automatic annual across-the-board increases;

Provide $429,000 for CBO's share of the FASAB budget;

Provide $75,000 (previously paid by the House of Representatives) for telecommunications services to the Alternate Computing Facility;

Complete the replacement of CBO's Budget Analysis Data System (BADS), the agency's primary budget-tracking system, with a lower-cost, more-capable inhouse system. After accomplishing that replacement midyear, CBO plans to continue to develop and exploit the capabilities of the new system—to improve the speed and breadth of the agency's analyses-during the remainder of the year and into the next, but at a much lower overall annual development cost.