Mention the “GAO’s Yellow Book” or the “Government Auditing Standards of the U.S. Government Accountability Office” to 10 evaluators and you will likely receive 10 blank stares. Most evaluators don’t realize this document even exists, and those who do believe it relates only to auditing and accounting, certainly not to evaluation. But they would be wrong. Two of the document’s eight chapters and 50 of its 166 pages (30%) are devoted to “performance auditing,” which is extremely similar to program evaluation. In addition, this document is being revised this year, and the new Yellow Book may contain standards of special interest to evaluators. In this highly interactive Think Tank, two senior AEA members who serve on the US Comptroller General’s advisory council to the Yellow Book introduced the new standards and led a discussion of how they are applicable and useful to evaluators working both inside and outside government.#2010Conference #IndependentConsulting #GovernmentEvaluation #EvaluationUse #EvaluationPolicy