Review of the Air Force Civil Engineer Cost Accounting System

A review was conducted of the Air Force Civil Engineer Cost Accounting System at Travis Air Force Base, California. The review included an examination of the Department of Defense Instructions and Air Force manuals and regulations, interviews with officials, test checks, tracing of transaction flows, and other audit routines as necessary to accomplish the objectives of the review. A review was also conducted of the Air Force Audit Agency's 1977 audit of the system at Travis Air Force Base. Since this is a standard system and has been implemented at about 119 installations worldwide, GAO believed it was especially important that the Audit Agency adequately review it to ensure that the system was implemented in accordance with the approved design.

Air Force implementation of the Civil Engineer Cost Accounting System at Travis Air Force Base substantially conformed to the GAO-approved system design. However, residual material costs may not have been accurately reported in cost reports because the internal controls for recording costs of residual material transferred to and from work orders were weak. The scope of the Audit Agency's 1977 review of the Civil Engineer Cost Accounting System and the 15 days authorized to complete it were inadequate. If not done in conjunction with a full-scale system audit, reviews of approved accounting systems in operation should verify conformity with an approved system design and include (1) a review and evaluation of internal controls, (2) limited reconciliations of final products with supporting documentation, and (3) limited computer edit tests.

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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