Financial Management

Forest Service Is Not Consistently Implementing Charge-as-Worked Cost Reporting Gao ID: AFMD-90-50 June 12, 1990

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO reviewed the Forest Service's actions to charge its accounts as worked rather than as budgeted in fiscal years (FY) 1988 and 1989.

GAO found that: (1) the Forest Service took a number of actions to implement the charged-as-worked policy, including directives, letters, memoranda, and revisions to its account coding structure; (2) such Service actions resulted in employees' strong awareness of the charged-as-worked policy and the need to properly charge costs; (3) Service employees believed that the policy was effective and had a positive impact on their work; (4) the Service experienced problems in implementing the charged-as-worked policy and comparing units' cost information, primarily because units used different work details, shared services, equipment costs, budget activity accounts, and categories of work; (5) the Service used practices that inhibited unit compliance with the charged-as-worked policy, and such practices hampered units' efforts to charge costs to the benefiting activities, resulting in inaccurate activity cost information; and (6) Service management controls for the charged-as-worked policy were inconsistently applied by units, unit adherence to the Service's corrective action varied by location, and the Service had not fully implemented further corrective action.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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