Military Personnel
DMDC Data on Officers' Commissioning Programs is Insufficiently Reliable and Needs to be Corrected Gao ID: GAO-07-372R March 8, 2007The Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) is a key Department of Defense (DOD) support organization that, among other things, generates reports for defense organizations such as the military services, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Staff. External organizations such as GAO and federally funded research and development centers also rely on DMDC for quantitative data and analyses pertaining to a wide variety of issues, including the numbers of DOD personnel in specified occupations or demographic groups, servicemembers' attitudes, and compensation. DMDC reports to DOD's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. In describing its databases, DMDC states that it maintains the largest archive of personnel, manpower, training, and financial data in DOD. It also notes that the personnel data are broad in scope and extend back to the early 1970s covering all services, all components of the total force (active duty, guard, reserve, and civilian), and all phases of the personnel life cycle (accession, separation, and retirement). DMDC data serve as the basis for DOD's annual Population Representation in the Military Forces which, among other things, provides information on the numbers of officers who were accessed into the military from each service's various commissioning programs: military academies, Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC), Officer Candidate Schools (OCS: for the Army, Navy, and Air Force) and Officer Training School (OTS: for the Air Force). On January 19, 2007, we issued a report on officer accessions, retention, and foreign language training. The purpose of this report is to bring to your attention reliability issues with DMDC data that we encountered while preparing our report and to provide you with our recommendations to address these issues.
We found the information that DMDC provided to us on the number of officers accessed from DOD's various commissioning programs to be insufficiently reliable for use in our January 2007 report. Government auditing standards, which are applicable to all federal agencies including DOD, require that data be valid and reliable when the data are significant to the auditor's findings. More specifically, federal internal control standards require that data control activities, such as edit checks, verification, and reconciliation, be conducted and documented to help provide reasonable assurance that agency objectives are being met. We found discrepancies when we compared the DMDC-provided information on the number of officers accessed from DOD's commissioning programs (the academies, ROTC, and OCS/OTS) to information provided by the services. In the most extreme example of a discrepancy, DMDC-provided information indicated that 17 officers were accessed from the Marine Corps' ROTC program in fiscal year 2005, but Marine Corps-supplied information indicated that 160 officers were assessed. DMDC also provided us with information on the total number of officer accessions in fiscal year 2005, which were 6 per cent to 39 percent higher than the total numbers the four services provided us. Until DMDC corrects these data problems, it will be unable to provide policymakers with sufficiently reliable data upon which to base decisions related to officers. Therefore, we are recommending that DMDC reconcile its data with the services' data on officer accessions from the various commissioning programs for current and past officers and verify the accuracy of findings produced with the corrected data. In responding to a draft of this report, DOD partially concurred with our recommendation to reconcile DMDC and service data and did not concur with our recommendation to verify the corrected data. DOD stated, among other things, that we provided DMDC and the services with apparently different specifications in our requests for analyses. While we initially requested information on "all officers" from DMDC versus "commissioned officers" from the services, we clarified our specifications with DMDC staff before any analyses were begun. DOD also stated that DMDC has a longstanding policy to not correct historical data. In our evaluation of DOD's comments, we cite DOD and governmentwide policies that run contrary to DMDC's policy and emphasize the need for valid and reliable data.
RecommendationsOur 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.
Director: Team: Phone:GAO-07-372R, Military Personnel: DMDC Data on Officers' Commissioning Programs is Insufficiently Reliable and Needs to be Corrected
This is the accessible text file for GAO report number GAO-07-372R
entitled 'Military Personnel: DMDC Data on Officers' Commissioning
Programs is Insufficiently Reliable and Needs to be Corrected' which
was released on March 8, 2007.
This text file was formatted by the U.S. Government Accountability
Office (GAO) to be accessible to users with visual impairments, as part
of a longer term project to improve GAO products' accessibility. Every
attempt has been made to maintain the structural and data integrity of
the original printed product. Accessibility features, such as text
descriptions of tables, consecutively numbered footnotes placed at the
end of the file, and the text of agency comment letters, are provided
but may not exactly duplicate the presentation or format of the printed
version. The portable document format (PDF) file is an exact electronic
replica of the printed version. We welcome your feedback. Please E-mail
your comments regarding the contents or accessibility features of this
document to Webmaster@gao.gov.
This is a work of the U.S. government and is not subject to copyright
protection in the United States. It may be reproduced and distributed
in its entirety without further permission from GAO. Because this work
may contain copyrighted images or other material, permission from the
copyright holder may be necessary if you wish to reproduce this
material separately.
March 8, 2007:
The Honorable Robert M. Gates:
The Secretary of Defense:
Subject: Military Personnel: DMDC Data on Officers' Commissioning
Programs is Insufficiently Reliable and Needs to be Corrected:
Dear Secretary Gates:
The Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) is a key Department of Defense
(DOD) support organization that, among other things, generates reports
for defense organizations such as the military services, the Office of
the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Staff. External organizations
such as GAO and federally funded research and development centers also
rely on DMDC for quantitative data and analyses pertaining to a wide
variety of issues, including the numbers of DOD personnel in specified
occupations or demographic groups, servicemembers' attitudes, and
compensation.[Footnote 1]
DMDC reports to DOD's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for
Personnel and Readiness. In describing its databases, DMDC states that
it maintains the largest archive of personnel, manpower, training, and
financial data in DOD. It also notes that the personnel data are broad
in scope and extend back to the early 1970s covering all services, all
components of the total force (active duty, guard, reserve, and
civilian), and all phases of the personnel life cycle (accession,
separation, and retirement). DMDC data serve as the basis for DOD's
annual Population Representation in the Military Forces which, among
other things, provides information on the numbers of officers who were
accessed into the military from each service's various commissioning
programs: military academies, Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC),
Officer Candidate Schools (OCS: for the Army, Navy, and Air Force) and
Officer Training School (OTS: for the Air Force).
On January 19, 2007, we issued a report on officer accessions,
retention, and foreign language training.[Footnote 2] The purpose of
this report is to bring to your attention reliability issues with DMDC
data that we encountered while preparing our report and to provide you
with our recommendations to address these issues.
To prepare this report, we drew upon the work from our January 2007
report. As part of that examination, we requested that DMDC provide us
with information on officers commissioned into the four active duty
services--Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force--during fiscal years
2001, 2003, and 2005. During our data reliability assessments, we
reviewed documentation on DMDC's databases and checked the data to
determine if they were consistent with information that we had obtained
from some of the commissioning programs and DOD's annual Population
Representation in the Military Forces. After we found that some of the
information from DMDC did not agree with the information that some of
the commissioning programs had provided during our site visits, we
requested information from the services for each of their commissioning
programs in each of the three fiscal years cited. While we did not
conduct independent analyses using the services' databases, our review
of documentation on these databases as well as a comparison of service-
provided information to similar information from other sources and for
other time periods suggest that the service-provided findings were
sufficiently reliable for the purposes of that report. We then compared
the DMDC-and service-provided information to quantify the extent to
which the databases resulted in different findings concerning the
numbers of officers commissioned each year from the various
commissioning programs. We conducted our review from August 2006
through November 2006 in accordance with generally accepted government
auditing standards.
Results in Brief:
We found the information that DMDC provided to us on the number of
officers accessed from DOD's various commissioning programs to be
insufficiently reliable for use in our January 2007 report. Government
auditing standards, which are applicable to all federal agencies
including DOD, require that data be valid and reliable when the data
are significant to the auditor's findings.[Footnote 3] More
specifically, federal internal control standards require that data
control activities, such as edit checks, verification, and
reconciliation, be conducted and documented to help provide reasonable
assurance that agency objectives are being met. We found discrepancies
when we compared the DMDC-provided information on the number of
officers accessed from DOD's commissioning programs (the academies,
ROTC, and OCS/OTS) to information provided by the services. In the most
extreme example of a discrepancy, DMDC-provided information indicated
that 17 officers were accessed from the Marine Corps' ROTC program in
fiscal year 2005, but Marine Corps-supplied information indicated that
160 officers were assessed. DMDC also provided us with information on
the total number of officer accessions in fiscal year 2005, which were
6 per cent to 39 percent higher than the total numbers the four
services provided us. Until DMDC corrects these data problems, it will
be unable to provide policymakers with sufficiently reliable data upon
which to base decisions related to officers. Therefore, we are
recommending that DMDC reconcile its data with the services' data on
officer accessions from the various commissioning programs for current
and past officers and verify the accuracy of findings produced with the
corrected data.
In responding to a draft of this report, DOD partially concurred with
our recommendation to reconcile DMDC and service data and did not
concur with our recommendation to verify the corrected data. DOD
stated, among other things, that we provided DMDC and the services with
apparently different specifications in our requests for analyses. While
we initially requested information on "all officers" from DMDC versus
"commissioned officers" from the services, we clarified our
specifications with DMDC staff before any analyses were begun. DOD also
stated that DMDC has a longstanding policy to not correct historical
data. In our evaluation of DOD's comments, we cite DOD and
governmentwide policies that run contrary to DMDC's policy and
emphasize the need for valid and reliable data. DOD's comments are
provided in enclosure I, and our evaluation of the comments appear at
the end of this report.
Discrepancies Found in DMDC-and Service-Supplied Information on the
Officers Accessed from the Various Commissioning Programs:
We decided not to use the information DMDC provided to us for our
January 2007 report due to our concerns about the reliability of the
data on officers' commissioning programs--a primary focus of our
examinations of how officers were accessed into the military and how
long they remained on active duty. Government auditing standards
require that data be sufficiently valid and reliable when the data are
significant to the auditor's findings.[Footnote 4] More specifically,
federal internal control standards require that data control
activities, such as edit checks, verification, and reconciliation, be
conducted and documented to help provide reasonable assurance that
agency objectives are being met.
During our analyses, we found discrepancies when we compared the DMDC-
provided information on the number of officers commissioned from each
program to the numbers provided by some of the commissioning programs.
To address these discrepancies, each service's personnel headquarters
office subsequently supplied us with the numbers of officers
commissioned in fiscal year 2005.[Footnote 5] For all four services,
the DMDC-provided numbers for total accessions were greater than the
service-provided numbers: by about 28 percent for Army, 6 percent for
Navy, 39 percent for Marine Corps, and 10 percent for Air Force (see
table). While many of the DMDC-provided numbers for specific
commissioning programs shared this pattern of being higher than the
service-provided numbers, some discrepancies were in the opposite
direction. For example, relative to the DMDC-supplied data, the Marine
Corps-supplied information showed about 9 times (17 versus 160) as many
officers being commissioned through ROTC in fiscal year 2005. In
contrast, the Army-supplied number for officers commissioned in fiscal
year 2005 from its OCS was about 26 percent larger than DMDC's number.
Table 1: Discrepancies in the Numbers of Officers Commissioned from
Different Programs[A] for Fiscal Year 2005:
Army.
Service and organization supplying information: DMDC;
Commissioning program: Academy: 1,000;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 3,256;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 1,069;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 2,401;
Total: 7,726.
Service and organization supplying information: Army headquarters;
Commissioning program: Academy: 954;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 3,067;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 1,352;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 672;
Total: 6,045.
Service and organization supplying information: Difference;
Commissioning program: Academy: 46;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 189;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: -283;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 1,729;
Total: 1,681.
Navy.
Service and organization supplying information: DMDC;
Commissioning program: Academy: 788;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 869;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 477;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 1,590;
Total: 3,724.
Service and organization supplying information: Navy Headquarters;
Commissioning program: Academy: 749;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 825;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 586;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 1,346;
Total: 3,506.
Service and organization supplying information: Difference;
Commissioning program: Academy: 39;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 44;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: -109;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 244;
Total: 218.
Marine Corps.
Service and organization supplying information: DMDC;
Commissioning program: Academy: 209;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 17;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 1,383;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 557;
Total: 2,166.
Service and organization supplying information: Marine Corps
Headquarters;
Commissioning program: Academy: 213;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 160;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 460;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 728;
Total: 1,561.
Service and organization supplying information: Difference;
Commissioning program: Academy: -4;
Commissioning program: ROTC: -143;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 923;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: -171;
Total: 605.
Air Force.
Service and organization supplying information: DMDC;
Commissioning program: Academy: 990;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 2,582;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 873;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 1,037;
Total: 5,482.
Service and organization supplying information: Air Force Headquarters;
Commissioning program: Academy: 918;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 2,391;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 790;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 891;
Total: 4,990.
Service and organization supplying information: Difference;
Commissioning program: Academy: 72;
Commissioning program: ROTC: 191;
Commissioning program: OCS/OTS: 83;
Commissioning program: Direct/other/unknown: 146;
Total: 492.
Source: GAO analysis of data from DMDC and the services.
[A] The four commissioning sources identified in the table were those
provided by DMDC. Although other units supplying information provided
additional subcategories of commissioning source (e.g., ROTC
scholarship and ROTC non-scholarship), we used the four DMDC categories
to facilitate the presentation of the information.
[End of table]
We do not know the causes for the discrepancies with DMDC's data
because DMDC officials did not respond to our request for additional
information or assistance in reconciling the problems found when we
were preparing our January 2007 report. However, our prior work has
shown reliability problems with other DMDC data and analyses. For
example, in September 2006, we found problems with the reliability of
mobilization data for reserve soldiers and that DMDC's processes for
data analyses need improvement.[Footnote 6] When we shared our findings
with the services prior to the publication of our September 2006
report, service officials suggested that some of the data discrepancies
may have been introduced by DMDC analysts when they made changes as the
result of their quality check procedures. Although this may be an
issue, there could also have been errors in the creation of the files
sent to DMDC by the services.
Findings produced from unreliable DMDC data on officer commissioning
programs can lead to adverse consequences. First, it could impair
officials' ability to make sound data-driven decisions. Second, the
inability to use data from a single DOD-wide source--DMDC--results in
redundant efforts. In the present instance, the four services had to
each conduct the same analyses. Third, DOD-wide information on
personnel occupations and other variables that are coded differently in
the service-specific databases are difficult or impossible to compare.
For our January 2007 report, we were unable to conduct planned analyses
on officer occupations because the services do not use the DOD-wide
occupational codes that DMDC uses to facilitate service-to-service
comparisons for that type of information.
Recommendations for Executive Action:
We recommend that you direct the Under Secretary of Defense for
Personnel and Readiness to require the Defense Manpower Data Center to
take the following two actions:
* reconcile its data with data from the services on accessions from the
services' commissioning programs for current and past officers, and:
* verify the accuracy of its corrected database through further
analyses such as demographic breakouts (such as race, gender, and year
accessed) for each officer commissioning program.
Agency Comments and Our Evaluation:
In written comments on a draft of this report, DOD partially concurred
with one of our recommendations and did not concur with our other
recommendation. We continue to believe that both of our recommendations
have merit and should be implemented as soon as possible to prevent
further distribution and use of DMDC reports that are based on data of
insufficient reliability as well as provide Congress, DOD decision
makers, and others with the accurate information needed to take
informed actions. DOD's comments are reproduced in enclosure I.
DOD partially concurred with our recommendation to require DMDC to
reconcile its data on current and past officers with data from the
services on accessions to the services' commissioning programs. The
department stated that we provided DMDC and the services with
apparently different specifications in requests for analyses and that
reconciliation of the DMDC and service differences may not be a
reasonable request. We disagree with DOD's suggestion that we provided
DMDC and the services with apparently different specifications in our
data requests. Although we requested information on "all officers" from
DMDC versus "commissioned officers" from the services in our initial
request, we clarified our interest in statistics on commissioned
officers during subsequent interactions with DMDC before its staff
began their analyses. We used three methods before DMDC began its
analyses to explicitly indicate that we were concerned with
commissioned officers only. Those three methods were (1) telephone
discussions with DMDC staff to discuss our overall engagement questions
about commissioned officers and the types of information that we
needed, (2) written instructions that specified that we intended to
construct tables showing findings by commissioning program, and (3)
several pages of mocked-up tables that showed DMDC staff that we were
interested in officer breakouts by commissioning source. Since warrant
officers do not receive their training through a commissioning program,
they should not have appeared in the information that DMDC provided us.
Furthermore, if DOD is indicating that the DMDC information is
different from those of the services because DMDC included both warrant
officers and commissioned officers, the DMDC and service findings for
the Air Force should have been exactly the same since the Air Force
does not have warrant officers. However, the table presented earlier in
this report shows that the DMDC-provided information did not match the
Air Force-provided information. DOD's response also noted that our
recommendation may not be reasonable because the services may not have
the individual servicemember records needed for the reconciliation
analyses. This point is specious. As we noted earlier in this report,
DMDC conducted its analyses on officers' records that it obtained from
the services.
DOD did not concur with our recommendation to require DMDC to verify
the accuracy of the information in its database by conducting
additional analyses. The department provided two reasons for its
nonconcurrence. First, DOD stated that we provided conflicting guidance
to DMDC and the services when making the data request. We disagree, as
discussed in the previous paragraph. Second, DOD states that "DMDC has
a long standing policy to not correct historical data —" Again, we
disagree with DOD's statement, as this policy seems to contradict DOD
statements that may suggest otherwise. For example, the DOD Performance
and Accountability Report FY2005[Footnote 7] states, "The DOD is
committed to providing clear and reliable data to those who use it for
managing, decision making, and for oversight of the DOD programs. The
Department also ensures, to the greatest extent possible, that the data
are quantifiable and verifiable by putting in place internal management
controls and by being responsive to the insights provided by the
Department's Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Government
Accountability Office, and others." DMDC's policy is also counter to
governmentwide auditing standards[Footnote 8] which require, among
other things, that officials have implemented policies and practices to
reasonably ensure that valid and reliable data are obtained,
maintained, and fairly disclosed in reports. These controls help assure
management that it is getting valid and reliable information about
whether programs are operating properly on an ongoing basis. While we
believe that it is important to understand why earlier and later
analyses on the same database could result in different findings, DOD's
rationale for continuing to supply erroneous findings to decision
makers is inconsistent with governmentwide and DOD-wide internal
control standards which specify the importance of valid and reliable
data. When DMDC staff completed our data reliability questionnaire
asking about the completeness and accuracy of the data, they said "We
feel that it is accurate and can be used for analysis and decision
making." The inconsistencies that we identified in the table in this
report suggest otherwise.
We are sending copies of this report to the appropriate congressional
committees. We will make copies available to others upon request. This
report will be available at no charge on GAO's Web site at
http://www.gao.gov.
If you or your staff have any additional questions about the
reliability of officer commissioning data, please contact me at (202)
512-5559 or stewartd@gao.gov. Contact points for our Offices of
Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on the last
page of this report. GAO staff who made major contributions to the
report are listed in enclosure II.
Sincerely,
Signed by:
Derek B. Stewart:
Director, Defense Capabilities and Management:
[End of section]
Enclosure I: Comments from the Department of Defense:
Personnel And Readiness:
Under Secretary Of Defense:
4000 Defense Pentagon:
Washington, D.C. 20301-4000:
Mar 0 1 2007:
Mr. Derek B. Stewart:
Director:
Defense Capabilities and Management:
U.S. Government Accountability Office:
441 G Street, NW:
Washington, DC 20548:
Dear Mr. Stewart:
This is the Department of Defense (DoD) response to the Government
Accountability Office (GAO) draft report, GAO-07-372R, "Military
Personnel: DMDC Data on Officers' Commissioning Programs is
Insufficiently Reliable and Needs to be Corrected," dated January 25,
2007. DoD has reviewed the subject draft report and strongly non-
concurs with Recommendation 2. Our response to the specific
recommendations listed in the report is enclosed.
Our strong non-concurrence with Recommendation 2 is based on the fact
that the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC)'s data was deemed to be
incorrect based on reports provided independently by the Services. Our
initial research in response to this allegation indicates that the
problem is not incorrect data, but rather that the Services and DMDC
were asked to provide different information to the GAO. At no time was
the underlying data or the methodology used to generate the reports
compared by the GAO auditors. Specifically, DMDC was requested to
provide a report of "all" officers to GAO, which GAO then compared to
reports from the Services containing just commissioned officers.
Sincerely,
Signed by:
David S.C. Chu:
Enclosure:
As stated:
GAO Draft Report - Dated January 25, 2007 GAO-07-372R:
"Military Personnel: DMDC Data on Officers' Commissioning Programs is
Insufficiently Reliable and Needs to be Corrected":
Department Of Defense Comments To The Recommendations:
Recommendation 1: The GAO recommended that the Secretary of Defense
direct the Under Secretary of Defense (Personnel and Readiness) to
require the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) to reconcile its data
with data from the Services regarding accessions from the Services'
commissioning programs for current and past officers.
DOD Response: Partially concur. The DMDC will attempt to reconcile the
officer accession data that appears in the draft report to DMDC's
report. However, given that the Services were apparently provided
different specifications upon which to base its reports than those
provided to DMDC, and not knowing specifically what specifications the
Services did use to generate their numbers or having the individual
member records available to compare to DMDC's, this may not be a
reasonable request.
Recommendation 2: The GAO recommended that the Secretary of Defense
direct the Under Secretary of Defense (Personnel and Readiness) to
require the DMDC to verify the accuracy of its corrected database
through further analyses such as demographic breakouts (such as race,
gender, and year accessed) for each officer commission program.
DOD Response: Strongly non-concur. First, the real issue appears not to
be that the data is incorrect, but rather that the GAO is providing
conflicting guidance to various sources when they make requests for
data. Secondly, the DMDC has a long standing policy to not correct
historical data as the Service personnel applications are the
"authoritative source" for military personnel data and it would be
inappropriate for the DMDC to change data that was historically
presented by the Services as DMDC has it archived.
[End of section]
Enclosure IIGAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments:
GAO Contact:
Derek B. Stewart (202) 512-5559 or stewartd@gao.gov:
Acknowledgments:
In addition to the contact above, Jack E. Edwards, Assistant Director;
Laura G. Czohara; Alissa H. Czyz; Barbara A. Gannon; Cynthia L. Grant;
Julia C. Matta; Jean L. McSween; Bethann E. Ritter; Angela D. Thomas;
and Adam J. Yu made key contributions to this report.
[End of section]
(350950):
FOOTNOTES
[1] For example, see GAO, Military Personnel: Reporting Additional
Servicemember Demographics Could Enhance Congressional Oversight, GAO-
05-952 (Washington, D.C.: Sept. 22, 2005) and Military Personnel: More
DOD Actions Needed to Address Servicemembers' Personal Financial
Management Issues, GAO-05-348 (Washington, D.C.: Apr. 26, 2005).
[2] GAO, Military Personnel: Strategic Plan Needed to Address Army's
Emerging Officer Accession and Retention Challenges, GAO-07-224
(Washington, D.C.: Jan. 19, 2007).
[3] GAO, Government Auditing Standards: 2003 Revision, GAO-03-673G
(Washington, D.C.: June 2003).
[4] GAO-03-673G.
[5] Although not discussed here, we found similar discrepancies in the
DMDC-and service-provided information for fiscal years 2001 and 2003,
the other years that we examined in this report and in GAO-07-224. In
addition, data from DOD's Population Representation in the Military
Forces showed that DMDC's findings were consistent with previously
published DOD-wide data for officers accessed in fiscal year 2003. We
could not make the same comparisons for fiscal year 2005 because DOD
had not published its Population Representation in the Military Forces
report for fiscal year 2005 at the time that we completed the analyses
documented in this report.
[6] GAO, Military Personnel: DOD and the Services Need to Take
Additional Steps to Improve Mobilization Data for the Reserve
Components, GAO-06-1068 (Washington, D.C.: Sept. 20, 2006).
[7] DOD, DOD Performance and Accountability Report FY2005 (Arlington,
Va.: Nov. 15, 2005), p. 59.
[8] GAO-03-673G.
GAO's Mission:
The Government Accountability Office, the audit, evaluation and
investigative arm of Congress, exists to support Congress in meeting
its constitutional responsibilities and to help improve the performance
and accountability of the federal government for the American people.
GAO examines the use of public funds; evaluates federal programs and
policies; and provides analyses, recommendations, and other assistance
to help Congress make informed oversight, policy, and funding
decisions. GAO's commitment to good government is reflected in its core
values of accountability, integrity, and reliability.
Obtaining Copies of GAO Reports and Testimony:
The fastest and easiest way to obtain copies of GAO documents at no
cost is through GAO's Web site (www.gao.gov). Each weekday, GAO posts
newly released reports, testimony, and correspondence on its Web site.
To have GAO e-mail you a list of newly posted products every afternoon,
go to www.gao.gov and select "Subscribe to Updates."
Order by Mail or Phone:
The first copy of each printed report is free. Additional copies are $2
each. A check or money order should be made out to the Superintendent
of Documents. GAO also accepts VISA and Mastercard. Orders for 100 or
more copies mailed to a single address are discounted 25 percent.
Orders should be sent to:
U.S. Government Accountability Office 441 G Street NW, Room LM
Washington, D.C. 20548:
To order by Phone: Voice: (202) 512-6000 TDD: (202) 512-2537 Fax: (202)
512-6061:
To Report Fraud, Waste, and Abuse in Federal Programs:
Contact:
Web site: www.gao.gov/fraudnet/fraudnet.htm E-mail: fraudnet@gao.gov
Automated answering system: (800) 424-5454 or (202) 512-7470:
Congressional Relations:
Gloria Jarmon, Managing Director, JarmonG@gao.gov (202) 512-4400 U.S.
Government Accountability Office, 441 G Street NW, Room 7125
Washington, D.C. 20548:
Public Affairs:
Paul Anderson, Managing Director, AndersonP1@gao.gov (202) 512-4800
U.S. Government Accountability Office, 441 G Street NW, Room 7149
Washington, D.C. 20548:
