Defense Depot Maintenance

More Comprehensive and Consistent Workload Data Needed for Decisionmakers Gao ID: NSIAD-96-166 May 21, 1996

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1996 requires GAO to analyze the Defense Department's (DOD) report entitled Depot Maintenance and Repair Workload, which was submitted to Congress in April 1996. GAO focuses on DOD's analysis of (1) the need for and effect of the 60/40 legislative requirement concerning the allocation of depot maintenance workloads between the public and private sectors, (2) historical public and private sector depot maintenance workload allocations, and (3) projected public and private depot maintenance workload allocations.

GAO found that: (1) DOD generally complied with the section 311 requirements regarding workload data, except that it did not provide direct labor hour data as required by Congress; (2) DOD stated that it does not collect labor hour statistics from private contractors, but GAO's analysis of DOD's workload report shows that the use of more comprehensive and consistent data would provide Congress and DOD decisionmakers a more accurate picture of historical and future projections of depot maintenance workload allocations between the public and private sectors; (3) without such data, the reports are of limited use to Congress and defense decisionmakers when considering public and private sector workload allocation policy; (4) the 60/40 rule has not adversely affected military readiness; (5) the historical public-private depot workload data for fiscal years 1991 to 1995 presented in the workload distribution report includes in the public sector workload share, the value of repair parts and services they purchase from the private sector, but some of these parts are furnished to the private sector as government-furnished material; and (6) the report's projections of public-private depot workloads for fiscal years 1997 to 2001 are not consistent and comparable to historical data.

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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