Financial systems overwhelm DOD

An audit of the Defense Department's financial systems has found at least 673 systems across the organization — and DOD is still counting, a senior DOD official said.

"We obviously have to get those 673 systems and the thousand plus systems that back them up down into a manageable size," the official said. The overwhelming number of systems "allows for too many errors," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

DOD received $100 million in the fiscal 2002 budget to create a financial systems architecture that would act as a blueprint for the development of any DOD financial management systems. The audit is an initial step toward establishing that architecture.

DOD officials said that the fiscal 2003 budget seeks an additional $100 million to continue those financial fixes.

DOD officials have stressed that the money spent building a financial architecture — something that has been a longtime recommendation of the General Accounting Office and the DOD inspector general — is small in comparison to DOD's $379 billion budget proposal.

GAO officials have said that DOD's financial mess is the largest obstacle keeping the federal government from getting auditable books.

The DOD official called the department's financial systems an "absolute disaster."

"This place has not been operating as it should be," the official said. "And that means taxpayers are losing money, and we're just going to do everything we can to prevent that from happening."