Block military contractors from spending defense funds to review records, insiders say by Nick Schwellenbach | July 22, 2011 | + Week Tweet Last www.ralphlaurenpolosit.com, POGO revealed that the Pentagon had not acted on a 2009 legislative proposal from the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) to empower it more to force contractors to hand over internal records. While all within DCAA would quibble with the desire for greater subpoena power, there is an internal debate about how aggressive DCAA has been in accessing documents with the powers it already has. For example, in a 2009 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on DCAA, GAO stated, "Our discussions with DCAA auditors and reviews of audit documentation identified numerous instances where requests for contractor records were not satisfied." More information was contained in a footnote in the report: "In these cases, there was no evidence that DCAA oversight authorities raised the issue to management or contracting officials to initiate coercive action as called for in DCAA policy." POGO requested more information on these cases where DCAA auditors had trouble accessing record-keeping issues. According to a source intimately familiar with the GAO findings: ... the requests pertain to support for costs charged to the government and support for contractor personnel performing billing and cost estimating functions. Therefore, this information should have been provided to DCAA. Thus, it appears that DCAA leadership has not always supported on-the-ground auditors. Since the 2009 GAO report, DCAA auditors have continued to say they encounter access problems. A cursory search of fiscal year 2010 records from the DCAA Information Management System database, obtained by POGO through a Freedom of Information Act request, shows some comments from DCAA auditors who encountered record access problems. The text of some of them: "Potential number of record access issues must be resolved," "DCMA requested our participation in the review. They had record access issues and withdrew from the review," "The contractor denied us access to their books and records..." Without further information, it's difficult to assess what was happening in these particular DCAA assignments or how often these issues occur (there are thousands of DCAA assignments each year, but most don't have any text in the comment field of the database), but it's clear that from some accountants' perspectives, there are access problems. It's unclear if these access problems are related to the records that DCAA should be able to obtain under its current interpretation of its record access authority. But POGO's own conversations with DCAA accountants indicate that these are probably the records that DCAA should be able to obtain even without subpoena power. This brings us to an obvious next question: What does DCAA do when it doesn't have access to the records it should be able to compel? As we mentioned in our post last week Donna Ralph Lauren Dresses, an Associated Press article reported that since 2008 DCAA hasn't issued a single subpoena to force contractors to turn over records in over 20 years. To, due to court-imposed limitations on DCAA's record access, DCAA cannot subpoena some types of contractor records that aren't directly tied to a contract (some contractors voluntarily share this type of information anyway), but it has the power to compel records that are more closely tied to contracts. If DCAA hasn't issued a subpoena in over 20 years, yet still has had trouble accessing records within its power to obtain, that's "the definition of a risk-averse auditing agency," a former high-level DCAA official told POGO. As a penultimate note, DCAA auditor and whistleblower George Spanton testified before Congress in 1983 on the meaning of document access and why it's a problem when auditors aren't supported by management. He testified: ... I challenge any auditor to perform a professional audit without the records, no matter how minimal the restrictions. The only record one never sees might be the one that makes the entire lack of control worthless. The elevation of record access issues within DCAA reminds me also of another problem that existed at DCAA, where DCAA auditor referrals of "suspected improper conduct by contractors were thwarted by DCAA managers in some cases." "Suspected improper conduct" referrals can lead to contract fraud and other types of investigations. DCAA changed its policy in 2009 to allow auditors to bypass field office management and submit these referrals directly to DCAA headquarters.Related Topics Articles: Department of being an idiot a solar company census shows poverty data creep ef departure tweets hilarious from silent on...