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."