Defense Inventory: Better Reporting on Spare Parts Spending Will Enhance Congressional Oversight
Abstract
The Department of Defense's recent reports do not provide an accurate and complete picture of spare parts funding as required by financial management regulation. As a result, the reports do not provide Congress with reasonable assurance about the amount of funds being spent on spare parts. Furthermore, the reports are of limited use to Congress as it makes decisions on how best to spend resources to reduce spare parts shortages and improve military readiness. The reports' related guidance states that the services are to provide programmed and actual funding data for all spare parts in total and for such specific commodities as ships, aircraft engines, and combat vehicles. However, the reports did not always contain actual data. Instead of citing actual amounts of annual operations and maintenance appropriations spent for spare parts for the past fiscal year, all of the Army's amounts and most of the services commodity amounts were estimates. The Department presented these estimates, which were derived from various service computations, modeling, and historical data, because the services do not have a reliable system to account for and track the needed information on their actual spending by commodity. According to comptroller officials in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, these estimates are all they have access to, given the absence of a comprehensive financial management system that reports accurate cost accounting information. The officials said that developing better estimates would be expensive and potentially difficult, factors that should be considered in deciding whether the current information, although not accurate, is acceptable. Our work shows, however, that, while unaudited, detailed information on spending is routinely available at the major commands. In addition to not citing available data on actual spending, the services' reports were not complete.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 2002
- Accession Number
- AD1150386
Entities
People
- David R. Warren
Organizations
- United States Government Accountability Office