The report comes despite initiatives that called for the government to improve information sharing, including the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004. The 2002 law required the development of policies for sharing classified and sensitive but unclassified homeland security information. The 2004 measure called for the development of an Information Sharing Environment for terrorism information, the GAO said.

Without government-wide policies and processes on sharing information, the federal government lacks a comprehensive roadmap to improve the exchange of critical information needed to protect the country, the GAO said.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) is responsible for creating a government-wide information sharing environment, according to the report.

The GAO found that the 26 agencies it reviewed had 56 different sensitive-but-unclassified designations -- one agency alone had 16 of them -- to protect information deemed critical to their missions. Examples include sensitive law or drug enforcement information or controlled nuclear information. However, there are no government-wide policies or procedures to determine how such critical information should be classified or to ensure that all agencies uses the same designations, the GAO said.

'Without such policies, each agency determines what designations and associated policies to apply to the sensitive information it develops or shares,' the GAO said.