Improvements Needed to the Purchase Card On-Line System

Abstract

The Director of Program Development and Implementation, Defense Procurement and Acquisition Policy (DPAP), Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics), requested this audit. Our objective was to determine whether Department of Defense (DoD) Approving/Billing Officials adequately reviewed transactions that the Purchase Card On-Line System (PCOLS) referred for being at-risk of noncompliance with applicable laws and criteria. In addition, we were to determine whether DoD Approving/Billing Officials adequately reviewed cases in which they identified cards as lost or stolen. The PCOLS suite of applications consists of the following modules: Enterprise Monitoring and Management of Accounts; Authorization, Issuance, and Maintenance; Data Mining; Risk Assessment; and PCOLS Reporting. We found that neither we nor DPAP could use the PCOLS to assess and determine whether DoD Approving/Billing Officials adequately reviewed 32,690 transactions that the system referred from January through June 2012 as being at-risk of noncompliance with applicable laws and criteria, including lost and stolen cards. This occurred because the automated system did not contain sufficient capability to automatically retrieve and match the case disposition reviews with the universe of the at-risk Government Purchase Card transactions, and was unable to archive case history file data, which were maintained in a separate data warehouse. As a result, the automated system cannot be employed for oversight reviews, such as assessments of Approving/Billing reviews and disposition of at-risk transactions. Because of the information we requested to conduct the audit, the DPAP became aware that the automated system lacked the capability to produce the data needed to complete the assessment of the Approving/Billing Officials' reviews and initiated actions to improve the PCOLS. Thus, we are not making any recommendations in this report.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 27, 2013
Accession Number
ADA576465

Entities

People

  • Lorin T. Venable

Organizations

  • Office of the Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acquisition
  • Availability
  • Business Administration
  • Computers
  • Configuration Management
  • Contracts
  • Control Systems
  • Data Mining
  • Defense Systems
  • Department Of Defense
  • Governments
  • Logistics
  • Predictive Modeling
  • Procurement
  • Risk
  • Risk Analysis
  • United States

Readers

  • Aviation Safety Risk Assessment.
  • Computer Science.
  • Defense Financial Management and Audit.

Technology Areas

  • AI & ML
  • AI & ML - DoD AI Strategy