Shoddy Documentation Makes Good Fed IT Decisions Harder

The Defense Department's fiscal 2004 IT budget--a budget that accounts for about half of the $59 billion the federal government will spend on IT this fiscal year--contains material inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and omissions that limit its reliability, according to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress.

As a result, the White House Office of Management and Budget and Congress are constrained in their ability to make informed IT decisions and to conduct effective oversight and control, writes Randolph Hite, GAO's director of IT architecture and systems issues.

Defense's IT budget document includes a summary report and detailed capital-investment statements on each IT initiative. But, GAO pointed out, 15 initiatives that appear in the summary don't show up in the capital-investment reports. GAO identified 73 discrepancies with cost differences approaching $1.62 billion.

Contrary to federal rules, the Department of Defense doesn't include all costs of IT initiatives in its budget summaries. For instance, GAO notes, the cost of military personnel working on IT initiatives isn't included in the IT budget report. Responding to the criticism, the department concedes that the situation occurs because the spreadsheet it uses to define project costs extracts data from budget-justification documents that don't include full life-cycle costs of total cost of ownership. Defense officials agreed to examine that process.

The department also is inconsistent in how it uses appropriations to fund the same activities. Some Defense units use appropriations earmarked for researching, developing, testing, and evaluating. Others use appropriations that are allocated for operations and maintenance.

Hite attributes the problem largely to insufficient management attention and limitations in departmental policies and procedures. He recommends that the office of the defense secretary, consulting with departmental CIOs and comptrollers, increase management attention and establish appropriate controls and supporting systems to avoid these problems.

For the most part, Defense acknowledged the problem and began earlier this year to implement processes to correct many of the weaknesses GAO described. Still, Hite has called on Defense to furnish GAO with an explanation for discrepancies between spreadsheets that the Department of Defense submitted and more-detailed descriptions of planned IT expenditures.