Long-standing financial and business management problems
at the Department of Defense prevent it “from producing
reliable and timely information for making decisions and
for accurately reporting on its billions of dollars of
assets,” the Government Accountability Office has said
in a new report.
Blaming DoD management for contributing to billions in
annual waste “in a time of increasing fiscal constraint,”
the report said financial and business management
weaknesses continue despite DoD’s request for $13
billion in fiscal 2005 to run and improve duplicative
systems.
That’s $6 billion less than the department requested in
fiscal 2004, but the report said the difference in
spending is more the result of a “reclassification of
systems rather than an actual spending reduction,” and
questioned some reclassifications because of
“inconsistent information.”
The number of business systems has increased by 1,900
since April 2003 to 4,150, many of which are in the same
business area, said the report, citing it as evidence
of “the duplicative and stove-piped nature of DoD’s
systems environment” – for example, DoD reported a 255
percent increase in the number of logistics systems
since April 2003 to over 2,000.
“DoD still does not have an effective department-wide
management structure for controlling business systems
investments,” according to GAO-05-381.
It said the lack of an “integrated management structure”
clearly defining the relationship between the domains
and the military services risks further “parochialism
contributing to the current problems.”