Financial Management - Dod Inventory of Financial Management Systems Is Incomplete: Aimd-97-29 (Paperback)

Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO reviewed the Department of Defense's (DOD) financial management systems, focusing on the accuracy and completeness of DOD's inventory of financial management systems. GAO found that: (1) DOD does not have a comprehensive inventory of the systems it relies on to record, accumulate, classify, and report financial information; (2) the number of systems included in DOD's inventory was limited because the regulations and guidance from the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) did not properly define financial management systems; (3) Office of Management and Budget Circular A-127, Joint Financial Management Improvement Program system requirements, and the recently enacted Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996 define financial management systems to include the financial systems and the financial portions of mixed systems necessary to support financial management; (4) a mixed system is defined as an information system that supports both financial and nonfinancial functions of the federal government or its components; (5) DOD considers mixed systems that are generally not within the Chief Financial Officer (Comptroller) organization, such as acquisition, logistics, and personnel systems, to be nonfinancial and, therefore, does not include them in its inventory; and (6) although GAO did not identify all of the systems that should have been included, several of the excluded systems account for billions of dollars of assets and clearly meet the required definition of financial management systems.