Arms Control And Disarmament Agency

Pursuant to a congressional request, GAO determined what actions the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) and the Department of State took in response to its recommendations to improve the control, protection, and accountability of sensitive compartmented information (SCI) at an ACDA sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF).

GAO found that: (1) ACDA had established formal, written procedures to implement applicable directives and security regulations needed to control, file, store, and destroy SCI documents; (2) as of April 1990, ACDA had filled 2 of 3 full-time positions for overall SCIF security and document accountability and control; (3) from late 1989 through early 1990, ACDA could not account for approximately 3,000 documents in its SCI inventory, but did not comply with applicable directives when notifying the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the missing documents; (4) ACDA inability to timely report the missing documents delayed the originating agencies' ability to conduct damage assessments; (5) since ACDA did not maintain records of copies of electronically transmitted SCI messages, it did not comply with accountability and control procedures prescribed in the applicable directives; (6) since State lacked a full staff, it could not adequately review ACDA security controls and had limited ability to determine ACDA compliance; and (7) since ACDA did not complete all the CIA-required security upgrades, SCIF was still not accredited to store all SCI.

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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