Ethics Gateway

Overview

Currently, most federal agencies manage their Confidential Financial Disclosure (OGE450) filing process through offline PDF forms or antiquated COTS solutions. Issues with this approach include:

• Poor user experience making it more difficult to review the filings
• System’s inability to provide insight into the process and generate the required reports
• Inability to complete a comprehensive review
• People not filing because of system inadequacies
• Poor or no insights into filing gaps (who should file, when, why)

Because of this, numerous agencies fail audits from the Office of Government Ethics (OGE). Leveraging Groundswell’s experience in solving compliance issues for federal agencies and Appian’s enterprise automation platform, Groundswell’s Ethics Gateway (EG) solution addresses these issues at the source.

This solution includes a suite of guided processes for filing and reviewing the OGE 450 form, management of employee filing status, extensions, rotations, and documents, and robust and insightful reporting for the agency, all while complying with federal standards and guidelines. The system also provides real time visibility into the filing status of the employees at the agency and key reports that are essential for the agency to accurately report information to the Office of Government Ethics (OGE).

Key Features & Functionality

• Suite of guided processes for the filing and review process of the OGE 450 form to improve user experience, save time and reduce errors
• Flexible review process that can be tailored for any agency’s specific review requirements to adapt to your agency’s specific requirements while maintaining full compliance
• Ability to request, review, and report on extensions to a filer’s OGE 450 due date, improving visibility and reporting at all levels
• Email notifications integrated along the filing and review process to keep filers up to date on their form status, drastically improving filing deadline compliance
• Full audit tracking of actions taken and data updated on all forms, improving audit capabilities and effectiveness (only changes are flagged for review)
• OGE-specific annual report data can be generated to reduce time and effort in reporting while improving report accuracy and compliance
• Ethics reviewers can accomplish most tasks or make changes on their own with an intuitive interface without IT intervention (opening and closing filing period, managing notifications, managing help resources, etc.)
• Intelligent and compliant records retention policy automatically applied to all forms in the system

Benefits & Business Impact

Groundswell’s Ethics Gateway, built on the Appian Low-Code Automation platform, enables organizations to effectively manage their OGE450 filings with:

• Consistent data quality
• An integrated sites experience that enables efficient data entry and record tracking
• Ability to integrate with existing systems to leverage up to date information for employees and contractors, reducing implementation time, cost and risk
• Reporting to track organizational compliance