Usefulness of Financial Reports Produced by the Resource Management System

The Navy Resource Management System is the Navy's accounting system for the operations and maintenance of Navy appropriations. A review was made of the need for and usefulness of financial reports produced by the Resource Management System, as well as certain aspects of the Navy's Integrated Disbursement and Accounting System. In addition, GAO considered the Navy's efforts to: (1) periodically reevaluate the continued need for and usefulness of computer outputs; and (2) eliminate unneeded reports and correct weaknesses in marginal reports.

Managers and operating personnel generally do not use the uniform financial reports produced by the Resource Management System to control appropriated funds and manage day-to-day operations. To overcome the problems of reports with incomplete information and confusing formats, naval managers run memorandum accounting systems to obtain needed information. The Integrated Disbursement and Accounting System, which is being developed, should make the information on computer produced financial reports more complete and more timely. However, the Navy is not revalidating Resource Management System uniform reports to eliminate or reformat marginal reports as part of the design and implementation of the Integrated Disbursement and Accounting System. Instead, revalidation will be deferred until after the system is completely implemented in July 1984. Thus, the Navy will not fully solve all known problems with report formats and will perpetuate, to some degree, the need for maintaining memorandum accounting records.

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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