Navy Supply

In fiscal year 1990, the Navy obligated $1.1 billion for depot-level repair of aircraft and ship components. Although the Navy has policies to prevent unnecessary repairs, the Aviation Supply Office and the Ships Parts Control Center--the inventory control points--are not following them. As a result, the Navy is spending considerable sums to repair items that are excess or that could be replaced at less cost. In addition, many of the Navy's data used in managing the repair program are inaccurate. Reliance on inaccurate data often results in overestimation of item requirements and, ultimately, excess assets.

GAO found that: (1) the Navy spends millions of dollars annually to repair assets that have no known wartime or peacetime requirements, mainly because of inadequate procedures for identifying excess assets in the repair program; (2) the Navy prevents unnecessary repairs and reduces the need for funds to pay for repair costs, when it uses serviceable ready-for-issue assets in lieu of repair; (3) the Navy made unnecessary repairs, since Navy procedures for identifying long supply assets in the repair program underestimated the number of items actually in long supply; (4) between April and September 1990, Navy repair activities made 7,710 repairs costing $9.2 million for items that were excess to current needs; (5) contrary to Navy policy, it was repairing many items that it could have more economically replaced, and an analysis of 25 randomly selected items indicated that it would have been more economical to replace 18 of the items; and (6) records on repair survival rates and repair turnaround times were not accurate and tended to overstate the repair requirements, which ultimately led to the accumulation of excess stocks.

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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