Administrative Examination of Military Pay Matters

Although the audit staff at the Navy Finance Center, Cleveland, Ohio, has been examining travel and leave transactions in selected ship and foreign station accounts to test the quality of the Navy disbursing function, administrative examiners at the Center have detected and corrected only a small fraction of the travel and leave errors occurring in these accounts. A 1971 report emphasized the need for improvement in the quality and management of Navy audits and examinations of military pay and allowances. In tests performed in 1976 and 1977, a statistical sample of 1,859 vouchers paid by 84 ship and 38 foreign station disbursing officials was examined. Although the accounts had been previously audited by Finance Center examiners, there were travel and leave errors of $10 or more on over 29 percent of the ship account documents and 19 percent in the foreign station account documents. The travel and leave errors have resulted from a variety of factors: (1) rotation of disbursing personnel; (2) inexperienced disbursing officers; (3) untrained disbursing clerks; and (4) complex regulations. However, sufficient resources have not been made available for the Finance Center's error detection and correction program, and thousands of errors have never been corrected. The Assistant Comptroller, Navy Financial Management Systems, should: (1) evaluate staffing policies to ensure that sufficient resources are available to effectively examine ship and foreign station accounts; (2) establish a policy and procedure for comparing leave computations; and (3) evaluate the use of statistical sampling techniques when auditing station and ship accounts.