In the past year the Defense Department’s comptroller’s office has created a plan for having the military services and defense agencies achieve financial audit readiness goals but details for implementing the path forward remain unclear, which is a concern if the 2017 audit goal is to be reached, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) official said yesterday.
The DoD Comptroller is clearing up the remaining steps to achieve the audit goals but so far the “results are mixed,” Asif Khan, director of Financial Management and Assurance at GAO, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management.
Financial management systems will have to be implemented “well before 2017 and just looking at the timeline is worrying because the completion timeline is close to 2017,” Khan said.
Federal agencies are required to produce auditable financial statements but the DoD currently can’t, Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.), the chairman of the Senate panel, said at the outset of yesterday’s hearing into the matter. Carper said that there is “momentum” to help out DoD, including a House panel that has been formed to study the issue as well as a commitment by new Defense Secretary Panetta to improve his department’s financial management.
In reports released by the GAO yesterday, Khan said a number of areas were examined across the military services that showed “significant weaknesses” in implementing the financial audit guidance. He mentioned that the Marine Corps has begun to make progress but that it has been “short-term heroic efforts that may not be sustained in the long-term.”
Khan also said that the interest in the issue by senior DoD officials is encouraging.