The military services are seeing both financial and non-financial benefits from using intergovernmental support agreements for certain services on their installations although closer tracking of the agreements could reveal opportunities for more savings, GAO has said.
The Department spends about $25 billion a year on its installations, GAO said, noting that it has designated DoD support infrastructure management as a high risk area since 1997. One response was a 2013 change in law allowing DoD to enter into agreements with state and local governments for services such as waste removal and grounds maintenance; currently there are 45 such agreements at 33 installations.
Examining eight of those agreements, GAO found that in five the actual cost during its first year was lower than the expected cost of a contract the installation had previously used to obtain that service. The other three produced cost avoidances, in which the installation obtained a new service at a cost lower than what the alternatives would have been.
The agreements also “have provided nonfinancial benefits such as enhanced mission effectiveness and readiness, reduced administrative time, and improved relationships with local communities,” it said.
“However, the military services are not fully monitoring benefits being realized from implemented IGSAs because they have not established formal processes to do so,” it added. “Developing and documenting processes to monitor any realized benefits of implemented IGSAs would provide the services with useful information on IGSA performance as they make decisions on devoting resources to developing and implementing these agreements in other locations.”
