GSA Transportation Audits

Contract Costs Can Be Reduced Gao ID: NSIAD-92-157 June 3, 1992

In 1989 the General Services Administration (GSA) began requiring contractors to collect data from paid transportation bills in addition to conducting its standard audit. This report looks at GSA's use of private companies to audit commercial transportation charges paid by federal agencies. GAO discusses whether (1) collecting the additional data resulted in more-thorough audits, (2) GSA adequately verified that the contractors provided the required data and GSA used it, (3) the contractors duplicated Defense Department data collection efforts, and (4) GSA has a basis for establishing its fees for data collection.

GAO found that: (1) GSA added transaction fee payments to the first-audit contracts to ensure that the first auditors reviewed all documents carefully for overcharges, but GSA did not know whether the fees achieved their purposes; (2) GSA statistics show that more than 20 percent of overcharges are still not identified until the second audit; (3) from October 1989 to the end of calendar year 1991, transaction fees represented more than 75 percent of payments GSA made to first auditors; (4) GSA had not verified that contractors provided the required data and that the data were useful to assess auditors' performance; (5) DOD has already captured nearly all of the same data that GSA is requiring from its contractors; and (6) GSA established its pay schedule for transaction fees by comparing various fees specified in its prepayment audit contracts.

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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