Summary: GAO reported on the Department of Justice's fiscal year (FY) 1984 progress in evaluating the adequacy of its internal controls and accounting systems under the Federal Managers' Financial Integrity Act (FMFIA).
GAO found that Justice has: (1) continued to make progress in its second-year implementation of the act; (2) initiated several long-term efforts to correct deficiencies in its accounting systems that did not conform to the Comptroller General's standards; and (3) made progress in correcting material internal control and accounting systems weaknesses reported in FY 1983 reports. Although Justice has reported that its systems of internal accounting and administrative control, taken as a whole, provide reasonable assurance that the act's objectives were met, GAO found that this assurance was not well founded because: (1) Justice has not yet corrected the accounting, automatic data processing (ADP), and internal control weaknesses which impaired the systems' abilities to provide this assurance; (2) Justice's internal control and ADP systems were not evaluated and tested in sufficient depth for it to know whether its controls were adequate; and (3) because of insufficient testing, Justice's accounting system evaluations did not show the extent to which the systems failed to conform to Comptroller General requirements. Justice reported accounting system problems such as: (1) insufficient cost, property, and accrual accounting data; (2) inadequate debt collection procedures; (3) lack of documentation; (4) late and inaccurate field reports; and (5) financial policies and accounting processes that needed improvement. Finally, Justice's ADP controls failed to ensure that only authorized users accessed the ADP systems.
