Financial Management

Problems in Accounting for DOD Disbursements Gao ID: AFMD-91-9 November 9, 1990

GAO reviewed the military services' accounting problems with cross-disbursements, focusing on cross-disbursements that the Department of State made on behalf of the services.

GAO found that: (1) the services' failure to use uniform financial information caused serious problems in accounting for disbursements; (2) the use of nonstandard data made the processing of cross-disbursement transactions extremely complex and resulted in clerical processing errors; (3) incomplete or erroneous cross-disbursement information resulted in millions of dollars of disbursements remaining unmatched with obligations; (4) as of September 30, 1989, the services could not match $54 million in cross-disbursements from State with obligations; (5) Army and Air Force data on total cross-disbursements as of December 1989 and February 1990, respectively, showed an aggregate of almost $6 billion in disbursements unmatched with obligations, and $440 million of that amount was over 180 days old; (6) the Department of Defense (DOD) implemented a departmentwide management improvement project, the Corporate Information Management (CIM) initiative, to develop standard, uniform information requirements and data formats; and (7) DOD planned to develop a single, uniform numbering or coding structure, the Single Numbering project, to link planning, programming, and budgeting phases with budget execution and accounting.

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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