Van Slyke's work cited in new U.S. Government Accountability Office report

In its recent report, “PAY FOR SUCCESS: Collaboration among Federal Agencies Would Be Helpful as Governments Explore New Financing Mechanisms” the GAO uses Van Slyke’s and co-authors Trevor Brown’s and Matthew Potoski’s work, Complex Contracting: Government Purchasing in the Wake of the U.S. Coast Guard’s Deepwater Program (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), as the basis for its analytical framework and recommendations for how OMB and, more broadly, federal agencies should approach, design, manage, and oversee their use in a broad range of public programs.

The GAO report explains, “Pay for Success (PFS), also known as Social Impact Bonds, is a contracting mechanism to fund prevention programs, where investors provide capital to implement a social service— for example, to reduce recidivism by former prisoners. If the service provider achieves agreed upon outcomes, the government pays the investor, usually with a rate of return based on savings from decreased use of more costly remedial services, such as incarceration.”

Van Slyke is an associate dean and chair of the department of public administration and international affairs at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, holds the Louis A. Bantle Chair in Business and Government Policy and is a two-time recipient of the Maxwell School’s Birkhead-Burkhead Teaching Excellence Award. 09/10/15