Military Personnel: DMDC Data on Officers' Commissioning Programs is Insufficiently Reliable and Needs to be Corrected

Abstract

On January 19, 2007, we issued a report on officer accessions, retention, and foreign language training. The purpose of this report is to bring to your attention reliability issues with DMDC data that we encountered while preparing our report and to provide you with our recommendations to address these issues. We found the information that DMDC provided to us on the number of officers accessed from DOD's various commissioning programs to be insufficiently reliable for use in our January 2007 report. Government auditing standards, which are applicable to all federal agencies including DOD, require that data be valid and reliable when the data are significant to the auditor's findings. More specifically, federal internal control standards require that data control activities, such as edit checks, verification, and reconciliation, be conducted and documented to help provide reasonable assurance that agency objectives are being met. We found discrepancies when we compared the DMDC-provided information on the number of officers accessed from DOD's commissioning programs (the academies, ROTC, and OCS/OTS) to information provided by the services.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 08, 2007
Accession Number
ADA475191

Entities

People

  • Derek B. Stewart

Organizations

  • United States Government Accountability Office

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accountability
  • Active Duty
  • Air Force
  • Business Administration
  • Congress
  • Data Analysis
  • Data Centers
  • Databases
  • Department Of Defense
  • Governments
  • Marine Corps
  • Military Personnel
  • Standards
  • Training
  • United States Government
  • Warrant Officers
  • Websites

Readers

  • Defense Financial Management and Audit.
  • Military Leadership and Professional Education.
  • Systems Analysis and Design