Financial Management: Further Actions Are Needed to Establish Framework to Guide Audit Opinion and Business Management Improvement Efforts at DOD

Correspondence issued by the Government Accountability Office with an abstract that begins "As the Comptroller General recently testified and as discussed in our latest financial audit report, the Department of Defense's (DOD) financial management deficiencies, taken together, continue to represent the single largest obstacle to achieving an unqualified opinion on the U.S. government's consolidated financial statements. For example, to date, none of the military services has passed the test of an independent financial audit because of pervasive weaknesses in internal control, processes, and fundamentally flawed business systems. Problems with the department's financial management operations go far beyond its accounting and finance processes and systems. The department continues to rely on a reported 4,000 or more fundamentally flawed finance, logistics, personnel, acquisition, and other management information systems to gather the data needed to support day-to-day management decision making and reporting. These systems were not designed to be, but rather evolved into the overly complex and error-prone operation--vulnerable to fraud, waste, and abuse--that exists today. Further, inefficiencies in DOD's current business operations, such as (1) little standardization across DOD components, (2) multiple systems performing the same tasks, (3) the same data stored in multiple systems, (4) manual entry of the same data into multiple systems, and (5) a large number of data transactions, combine to exacerbate problems with data integrity. This report answers the following questions: (1) Does DOD have a comprehensive, integrated plan for obtaining an unqualified audit opinion on the department's fiscal year 2007 consolidated financial statements? (2) Has the DOD Comptroller established effective processes and procedures for monitoring the implementation of the plan(s) to increase the likelihood of sustainable progress and to ensure that component auditability assertions are supported? (3) Has DOD established a clear link between DOD component improvement efforts and the department's BMMP?