The following is an excerpt from an article by John Walters for GovPro Magazine:
When Susan Combs took office as Texas State Comptroller of Public Accounts in January 2007, she posed a seemingly simple question: “Where does all the money go?”
Open Book Texas: A window on state spending
City’s P-Card Program Fights Fraud
The following is an excerpt from an article in GovPro Magazine:
Over the course of the last decade, credit card use by federal, state, and local government employees has skyrocketed. In 2001 alone, more than 3.1 million charge cards circulated among government agencies—enough to provide three of every four government employees with their own cards. This trend toward government credit card usage, largely fueled by the need to eliminate the paperwork associated with everyday purchases, seemed like a panacea for purchasing and accounting departments charged with tracking their organizations’ spending needs while streamlining back office operations.
Unfortunately, several news articles about credit card abuse by government employees in recent months have shown that procurement cards are not foolproof.
Texas City Improves Inventory Management
The following is an excerpt from GovPro Magazine:
The City of Houston’s Strategic Purchasing Division (SPD) in partnership with Periscope Holdings, Inc., implemented the National Institute of Governmental Purchasing’s (NIGP) 11-digit Commodity Coding system to ensure proper identification of materials. The implementation brings Houston closer to a citywide standardization effort across all departments. “We recognized the need for material master descriptions and a unit of measure standardization in order to address the problem of long text descriptions and inconsistencies across city departments,” said Calvin Wells, City Purchasing Agent.
Crank Up the Volume with NIGP Codes
The following is an excerpt from an article by John Mahin for GovPro Magazine:
Johnson County, Kan., is a growing and active community of more than 500,000 people who are engaged in a wide and diverse array of activities. The county’s per-capita income is high, and its residents are highly educated. This does not mean that we are without our share of problems; the county has to cope with criminal activity, mental health issues, developmentally challenged individuals, public health issues and every other type of challenge common to large population centers.
What does this mean with regard to NIGP commodity codes?
19th Edition of the NIGP Code Now Available
This 19th Edition of the NIGP 5-Digit Class-Item Code identifies products and services by Class and Item and includes revisions and additions resulting from commodity coding services applied to the NIGP Code since the issuance of the 18th Edition. While this edition reflects hundreds of changes to the Code over the past year, there is a significant major revision worth noting here:
Over the course of the past few months, the NIGP Code team has assembled a working group to study the need for and implementation of NIGP Codes for environmentally certified products/services (“green products”). Read the rest of this entry »