Military types tend not to
do anything in a small way. It's always about bigger planes, bigger battlefield
"toys" and, to accommodate all of this, bigger budgets. So you can
only imagine that, every once in a while, a Department of Defense bigwig may
turn to another and say, "Hey! You didn't happen to see that $2 billion
that was just lying around here this morning, did you?"
While such an inquiry may
seem like something out of a Dr. Strangelove-styled satire, it's actually not
far from reality. Even without any intent of fiduciary monkey business, DOD
operations are simply too huge and far-flung for agency leaders to account for
every single dime of a budget. So these leaders are seeking better tools to
better manage the business of defense.
This is where ACL Services, a Vancouver, British Columbia, provider of business
analytics/monitoring software, is making an impact. After the General
Accounting Office publicly called out the DOD for a lack of adequate
transparency and accountability, DOD financial/accounting managers hired ACL to improve its system.
ACL's tech solutions allowed
the DOD to quickly review and analyze more than 3 million records from the U.S.
Air Force's most recent six budgets. Essential areas such as travel expense
management, contract oversight and payroll were all included in the review,
undertaken by the Defense Finance and Accounting Services group in Europe (DFAS-Europe). Using the ACL solution, DFAS was able to
determine systematic problems and vulnerabilities in controls and budget use.
The upshot: More than $2 billion in unused Air Force budget and reduced
financial leakage/waste was uncovered, reported officials overseeing the
project.
Based on this success, the
company and ACL are now working to create an improvement program
that includes new policies and procedures, and improved training, metrics and
reporting standards to increase budget oversight and prevent these issues from
reoccurring in the future.
ACL recently released AuditExchange
2.0, a business assurance tool that manages and stores all audit content,
including working papers and analytics/results, in a secure, central
repository. That repository is accessible to authorized team members, and
allows for easier data analysis and continuous auditing/monitoring.
"The Air Force has
gained recognition as a leader in this new 'out-of-the-box' thinking about an
old standard way of doing things," says David T. Miod, a mission support
accountant of DFAS-Europe. "Traditionally, we focused on current-year
budget execution. But this has allowed us to examine fund usage over the past
six years, showing yearly trends and identifying process improvement areas to
ensure mistakes are not repeated."
