Supply Management

GAO reviewed the Marine Corps' procedures for planning and managing the phaseout of weapons systems and equipment, focusing on whether the Marine Corps Logistics Base (MCLB) in Albany, Georgia, was: (1) preparing adequate plans for items it was phasing out; (2) unnecessarily procuring or repairing phased-out items; and (3) coordinating phaseout plans with primary inventory control activities (PICA). GAO also examined the computer data logistics managers used to make procurement and repair decisions.

GAO found that: (1) the standard operating procedure (SOP) for preparing phaseout plans was inadequate; (2) logistics managers inadequately completed only a small percentage of the plans required for weapons systems and equipment; (3) MCLB was not providing PICA with sufficient information to compute requirements for some items being phased out, which could have caused PICA to buy unnecessary spare parts; (4) logistics managers had initiated unnecessary procurement and repair actions totalling about $1.8 million; (5) MCLB did not fully support 11 procurement or repair actions with current requirements data; and (6) computer data for some items contained errors. GAO also found that MCLB took corrective actions to: (1) revise SOP to require that phaseout plans also include asset-utilization plans; (2) assign responsibility for monitoring preparation of phaseout plans to two newly organized support branches; and (3) cancel the procurement and repair of items totalling about $1.7 million. GAO believes that: (1) MCLB actions to ensure the preparation and adequacy of phaseout plans and to manually review the accuracy of computer data should reduce unnecessary procurement and repair of phased-out items; (2) if computer errors are corrected in the new standard supply system, logistics managers should have more reliable information for phasing out weapon systems and equipment; and (3) if MCLB provides PICA with copies of phaseout plans, they will have more specific information on the level of support required for items phasing out of the inventory.