Better information could improve visibility over adjustments
to the Department of Defense’s research and development funds,
the Government Accountability Office has said in a new report.
It said “below threshold reprogramming” enables it “to adjust
program-funding levels without seeking congressional approval
as long as a certain dollar amount or percentage threshold
is not exceeded.”
However, the information in the BTR reports DoD recently
submitted to Congress was “of limited quality,” and lacked
data about withheld R-and-D funds for fiscal 2002 and 2003,
according to GAO-04-944.
Additionally, it said the reports were delivered months
after Congress began considering the new budget, that they
were largely classified, that the BTR data was derived by
subtraction rather than totaling the value of all BTR
transactions, and that overall, “the reports do not provide
a complete picture of how BTRs are implemented on a
program-by-program level.”
DoD lacks a comprehensive system for maintaining BTR data
across organizations, said GAO, though it noted that, “such
data could be such data can be reconstructed from DOD’s
multiple data collection systems.”
The Air Force, Army, Navy, and Missile Defense Agency
executed 1,927 BTRs in fiscal 2003, and used BTR data to
raise or lower funding levels by about $1 billion, or about
2 percent of the R-and-D funds for those organizations, and
Congress has required DOD to provide better and more timely
information on reprogramming and withhold activities,
according to GAO.
