Longstanding financial management and business related
problems continue to impede the Defense Department’s ability
to operate its numerous business operations efficiently and
effectively, the Government Accountability Office has said,
reiterating an earlier recommendation that a senior management
position be established to manage and oversee business
transformation efforts and improve the likelihood of
meaningful and broad-based reform.
It said that although the underlying conditions of the problems
remain fundamentally unchanged, DoD continues to be confronted
with pervasive problems related to its systems, processes
including internal controls, and human capital that have
resulted in billions of in annual wasted resources.
These weaknesses exist despite DoD requesting approximately
$19 billion in fiscal year 2004 to operate, maintain, and
modernize its reported 2,274 nonintegrated business systems,
said GAO, noting that DoD’s comptroller stated recently that
the number of systems could be twice that.
GAO also proposed — in report GAO-04-907T — that Congress
shift control and accountability for business system investments
from the DoD components to the recently created functional
areas known as domains, something DoD objects to, saying its
portfolio management process would provide the appropriate
control over business system investments.
However, providing the funding to the domains would be one way
of overcoming DoD’s embedded culture and parochial operations
and help limit spending on duplicative, nonintegrated systems,
GAO said.
