SAVE Award 2011 Ideas

State Magazine is published monthly. The purpose of the magazine is “to facilitate communication between management and employees at home and abroad and to acquaint employees with developments that may affect operations or personnel”.

All Department of State employees are required to have email accounts. The publication should be “Digital” only. Paper copies are delivered to our cubicles/offices religiously each month... more »

Each year GSA surveys thousands of federal employees in federally owned buildings and leased space. GSA accomplishes this through the use of the Tenant Satisfaction Survey. Currently, GSA offers two venues for federal tenants to complete the survey: paper and electronic (on-line). In order for the tenant to complete the survey on-line he or she must still have a paper survey with a special code to enter into the website.... more »

The cost of paper can be reduced by going to an electronic database. Currently we print and reprint a database for distribution several times a month. This takes away several man hours and uses a lot of paper. This can be reduced if we go to a computer read only file. Most of the places our database goes to have computer access anyway. If we were to go to a computer read only file on the share drive we could have several... more »

Daily, the Office of Regional Affairs Imports Offices within FDA print Notices of Action to Importers, etc. These Notices can be made to be only ONE page, not two in many more cases IF the Header margin on the first page were shortened by one or two lines. That would save so much paper, helping our pockets books, forests, and having a small but meaningful impact on our waste stream. Please consider this idea.

Provide IT departments tablet units, such as Cisco Cius, Apple IPAD, Samsung Galaxy or Blackberry Tablet units which may be used to load presentation and other meeting materials on to stop the use of handouts in meetings. Tablets with wireless capability not only eliminate the handout paper, but also the note taking papers which either clutter desks or fill recycling containers.

Multiple people in our office review multiple versions of draft NEPA documents. Instead of requesting paper copies, we normally request e-copies in Word format, store the documents in our shared directory, and all of us can comment using Tracked Changes which can be collated and sent back to the State DOT. This can be a HUGE paper saving practice.

Allow Contracting Officers and Contract Specialist to use a digital signature (verified with a Pin number) to sign contracts. We print out so many sheet of paper to sign them. We could sign an award electronically and send it through to the next person with out printing any paper.Also this saves the time of printing it, signining it, scanning it back in to the computer and sending for obligation.

Refine the Federal security clearance process by establishing (1) federal agency responsible for adjudicating all federal security clearance investigations government-wide. I recommend the entire security clearance operation be transferred to the Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security will have direct IT access or work with various Federal agencies and local law enforcement to complete the entire adjudication... more »

Instead of printing a performance plan for review, then another with changes for signature, then a copy with signatures, then a copy for annual review and so forth, provide online performance plans, with electronic password protected signatures which go right into eopf.

The Compex program has passengers sent to secondary to ensure that they comply with our rules and regulations. The passengers are sent to secondary based on a time system from primary. At least a thousand passengers are sent to secondary a day, because of this program. The reality is only a very small percentage of passengers sent to secondary under this program are found to be in violation of any laws or rules. The... more »

At Customs and Border Protection we sometimes have over a hundred counterfeit money orders in one shipment. Each name on the counterfeit money order that we do a seizure on has to be sent a letter from the Fine and Penalty office that is time consuming and costly.

I found that when you make a counterfeit money order shipment seizure to take it to the Postal Inspectors Office down the street and they will sign for all... more »

The VA is supposed to go paperless in the future. So, why do we print the letters from MAP-D, PCGL, and RBA 2000, for the veteran’s file? These letters are all saved and available for viewing at any time. PCGL and RBA 2000 letters are in Virtual VA. Uploading MAP-D letters into Virtual VA would result in having all letters stored in one centralized location. Additionally, since we have access to the veteran’s medical... more »

DHS/USCIS uses an on-line tool Internal Self-Inspection, Tracking and Evaluation (INSITE) to strengthen controls, identify deficiencies & write corrective plans. INSITE’s focus is compliance (laws, regulations, policies and procedures). INSITE is for accountability to all agency levels and fosters integrity.
INSITE administration is done by USCIS Management Directorate, Security & Integrity (OSI) Internal Review Division... more »

When printing copies of medical files from the Computerized Patient Record System (CPRS) the current program prints a cover page that contains PII that has no purpose for office use for every Progress Note printed. Since most Progress Notes are only one page long, deletion of this cover page from the program would typically result in a 50% reduction of the paper used.

In DHS/ICE we have an online training program called "Virtual University." The concept is sound and having online training saves the govt. money. However, at the end of each training course, we employees are directed to print out a hard copy of the certificate of completion. This is counterintuitive. The whole course is online, the certificate can be viewed online. Upper management is able to access the training... more »