Summary: GAO reviewed the military services' accounting problems with cross-disbursements, focusing on cross-disbursements that the Department of State made on behalf of the services.
GAO found that: (1) the services' failure to use uniform financial information caused serious problems in accounting for disbursements; (2) the use of nonstandard data made the processing of cross-disbursement transactions extremely complex and resulted in clerical processing errors; (3) incomplete or erroneous cross-disbursement information resulted in millions of dollars of disbursements remaining unmatched with obligations; (4) as of September 30, 1989, the services could not match $54 million in cross-disbursements from State with obligations; (5) Army and Air Force data on total cross-disbursements as of December 1989 and February 1990, respectively, showed an aggregate of almost $6 billion in disbursements unmatched with obligations, and $440 million of that amount was over 180 days old; (6) the Department of Defense (DOD) implemented a departmentwide management improvement project, the Corporate Information Management (CIM) initiative, to develop standard, uniform information requirements and data formats; and (7) DOD planned to develop a single, uniform numbering or coding structure, the Single Numbering project, to link planning, programming, and budgeting phases with budget execution and accounting.
