David Walker, U.S. comptroller general and head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office, visited the University on Thursday to give a lecture to a class co-taught by Chancellor Sean O’Keefe.
As the head of the GAO, Walker’s job is to oversee the offices and assure the accountability of the federal government.
“We work for the Congress and the American people,” Walker said. “Not for the president.”
Walker spoke to O’Keefe’s human resource education class and made a presentation titled “Strategic Human Capital Development” where he said he would be discussing ways to make transformations in the government.
The lecture was not open to the media.
The GOA recently released a statement issuing their preliminary views on government responses to Hurricane Katrina.
Walker said that after Hurricane Andrew hit in 1993, the GOA made recommendations to the Gulf Coast areas that could have eased the problems in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath had they been implemented.
The statement expressed a need to revisit the National Response Plan and see that response measures were executed more quickly in cases of expected national emergencies, Walker said.
Walker also said the GOA is focusing on the long-range fiscal condition of the country.
He said that if nothing is changed, in 30 years people will be paying two to three times the federal tax rates that they do now.
O’Keefe said he met Walker when they were both up for the position of comptroller general, but O’Keefe was “runner-up.”
Walker is the seventh comptroller general of the United States. He was appointed in 1998 for his 15-year term in office.
 
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