DoD Reporter's Notebook

Inside the DoD Reporter’s Notebook – 2015 a ‘pivotal year’ on path to clean DoD audit

For the first time, nearly all of the Defense Department’s budget is under professional audit, the Pentagon told Congress in a report last week, making 2015 a...

Jared Serbu@jserbuWFED

November 23, 2015 4:46 am

4 min read

“Inside the DoD Reporter’s Notebook” is a biweekly feature focused on news about the Defense Department and defense community, as gathered by Federal News Radio’s DoD Reporter Jared Serbu. Submit your ideas, suggestions and news tips to Jared via email.

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2015 a ‘pivotal year’ on path to clean DoD audit, which is also quite expensive

For the first time, nearly all of the Defense Department’s budget is under professional audit, the Pentagon told Congress in a report last week, making 2015 a “pivotal year” in getting the entire department’s books in audit-ready condition by the end of fiscal 2017.

As part of the department’s incremental approach to auditability, the Army, Navy and Air Force subjected their schedules of budgetary activity (SBA) to outside auditors for the first time. That one-year view of assets is only a piece of the statement of budgetary resources (SBR) needed to support the full financial audit every other federal department has passed, but combined with the work already underway in the Marine Corps and Defense agencies, it accounts for about 90 percent of dollars the Defense Department gets from Congress.

The outside accounting firms are expected to finish their work on fiscal 2015’s finances by the end of this calendar year, and Defense officials are pretty sure they know how things will go: the Army, Navy and Air Force will probably fail on their first go-round, just like the Marines did. But they said the only way to ferret out the department’s weaknesses is to undergo a no-kidding audit with real auditors.

“Just the fact of being under audit is not a trivial thing,” John Conger, the nominee to be DoD’s deputy comptroller said at his Senate confirmation hearing last week. “Auditors expect a certain responsiveness. When they ask for documentation for a particular transaction, you’re supposed to be able to provide that in a reasonable amount of time. We just haven’t had the systems in place to be responsive at all.”

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DoD: It’s met Congress’ demands on VA health interoperability, and then some

A few years back, after the Veterans Affairs Department and DoD leaders announced they’d stop building a shared electronic health records system despite hundreds of millions of dollars in sunk costs, a seemingly exasperated Congress ordered the two departments to at least come up with a way to seamlessly share outpatient data between their existing systems and move on to modern health IT standards.

DoD leaders attested last week that they’ve now done that and much more, even though it was a year later than Congress wanted.

“We are certifying that we have not merely met this requirement, but have gone even further to integrate data from other DoD systems, including inpatient, theater and pharmacy into this process, thereby exceeding the NDAA’s requirements,” Frank Kendall, the undersecretary of Defense for acquisition, technology and logistics wrote in a letter to the congressional committees that oversee DoD. “The additional data requirements were established by DoD and VA functional providers as important for continuity of care.”

For the last several years, DoD and VA clinicians have been using a hodgepodge of purpose-built tools that allowed them to view patient data in one another’s systems. As leaders in both departments are fond of pointing out, they’ve already been sharing more data than any two large health systems for several years. But within the next few months, the Joint Legacy Viewer, which is on its fourth software release in the past 22 months, will become the one-and-only application for reading data across departments.

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Several changes in DoD acquisition leadership

It was a big week for personnel moves within the military’s acquisition leadership: Last Monday, Heidi Shyu, the Army’s top acquisition executive, sent a note to staff saying she’d be moving on from government, and just two days later, her Air Force counterpart, Bill LaPlante did the same.

Also, one rung lower on the acquisition decision-making chain: Monday is Doug Wiltsie’s last day as the Army’s program executive officer for enterprise information systems. He’s moving from Fort Belvoir to the Pentagon, where he’ll lead the Army’s System of Systems Engineering and Integration (SOSE&I) directorate, the outfit responsible for, among other things, creating a series of integrated “computing environments” that tie together the service’s home station and battlefield IT systems.

As to the fact that two of DoD’s three service acquisition executives announced their departure in the same week, it would be interesting if there were a conspiracy to overthrow all of the military’s SAEs, but this appears to be a bona fide coincidence.

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