On Friday, the US Government Accountability Office released its analysis of the annual report on the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). The GAO’s main finding? That the Office of the US Global AIDS Coordinator (OGAC), which wrote the annual report, could have done a better job in summing up the program’s progress. GAO recommended that, next time, the report authors should make PEPFAR’s initial targets clearer when presenting results, and cite data sources to improve transparency.

“Neither of these recommendations threatens the effectiveness of the program,” a GAO employee who requested anonymity told Nature Medicine. “It just says how they could do a little bit better in their annual reporting to congress.”

In 2003 President George W. Bush initiated PEPFAR, a five-year, $15 billion initiative to allocate resources to fifteen target countries for HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria treatment and prevention. Two GAO reports from 2006 and 2008 praised the program overall, and an independent report announced that PEPFAR reduced AIDS deaths by 10% in twelve African countries. These successes led to the program’s reauthorization with triple the funding through 2013, and additional funding awarded in 2009.

The reauthorization required that each of the three government agencies that oversee PEPFAR funds — OGAC, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) — turn in annual progress reports, and that GAO must evaluate these reports. Friday’s analysis compared the PEPFAR planning and performance reports from each agency. GAO found no problems with the CDC and USAID reports, but the OGAC report could have been a bit clearer, according to GAO’s recommendations.

In response, “OGAC partially agreed with the first recommendation, pending discussions with stakeholders about implementation issues and consequences, and agreed with the second recommendation,” according to the GAO report highlights. So next time you read an OGAC PEPFAR report, expect higher quality writing and data reporting.

Image: Courtest of GAO