Navy aircraft were sidelined as they awaited parts last year that the service actually had in a warehouse. The problem? They didn’t even know the warehouse was there.
“Not only did we not know that the parts existed, we didn’t even know the warehouse existed,” Thomas Modly, the Navy‘s No. 2 civilian said at last week’s annual Military Reporters and Editors conference…
Had the Navy Department not done an audit, he said “we never would’ve known that problem.”
That was from a Military.com article, “Navy Audit Uncovered $126M in Aircraft Parts ‘We Didn’t Even Know Existed‘.”
One of the interesting things about the whole audit process is that it highlights the problems of modern oversight. Rather than checking up on what was actually purchased and how it was deployed, oversight agencies focus on what the DOD wants to buy, whether that is estimated to be optimal, and if it followed standardized processes. In essence, it focuses on before-the-fact control rather than after-the-fact control. It focuses on allocation of the budget (future plans) rather than test/auditing (accounting for what was done).
A better use of oversight is to make sure the things bought work properly and have been used efficiently. It’s not clear that the audit is the best method of doing this. But it certainly can help.
Oversight offices are inherently constrained in their staff size and knowledge. Otherwise they’d grow to be a hierarchy within a hierarchy. It is much more difficult for them to make decisions on what future actions should be pursued or not. It is much easier for them to look through accounting records, take a small sample, and trace those back to the lower levels and simply ask: Where is this purchase? How does it perform? Place it within the operational context for me. This kind of sampling would have the effect of disciplining all activities because no one can be sure when they might get called upon.
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