Defense Finance and Accounting Service Administration of Unit Costs

摘要

This is the fourth in a series of reports resulting from our 'Audit of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Administration of Unit Cost Rates'. As part of the Defense Business Operations Fund, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) must recover all operating costs by charging fees or cost recovery rates to its customers for providing goods and services. DFAS charges operating costs to its customers based on counts (that is, work load counts) of products or outputs produced. Audit Objectives. We conducted this part of our audit to find out whether unit costs for goods and services provided by DFAS were determined in accordance with DoD policies and based on actual costs incurred. In addition, we evaluated management controls over the accumulation of costs and work load data. To accomplish our objective, we reviewed selected aspects of unit cost administration at DFAS Headquarters and at each of the five major DFAS centers. We also judgmentally selected nine DFAS subordinate organizations (including Operating Locations and Defense Accounting Offices) for review. We selected 2 of the 16 DFAS outputs for the review, Commercial Invoices Paid (Output 9) and Monthly Trial Balances Maintained (Output 11). We examined those outputs because they made up $814 million, or 49 percent, of the $1.7 billion operating costs that were passed on to DFAS customers during FY 1995. in addition, because of concerns about billing for precertified travel vouchers at the DFAS Indianapolis Center, we performed a limited review of the precertified travel and precertified commercial invoice billing process at the DFAS Denver and Indianapolis Centers only. During FY 1995, the Travel Vouchers Paid output (Output 7) operating costs were $88 million, or another 5 percent of DFAS total costs.