Commission looks at fixing auditing tangle at Pentagon

Accountability is high on the list of priorities any time the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan meets. Monday’s three sessions all focused on various aspects of accountability in contracting in those two countries.

The first session looked at the lack of a single, accurate picture of contractor support for operations in the two countries. The Pentagon’s Synchronized Predeployment and Operations Tracker, or SPOT, counted 160,000 Defense contractor employees in the Afghanistan theater of operations. But the Army’s Central Command count numbered nearly 243,000. The discrepancy between the two counts was the focus of the Commission’s questions.

The second session concentrated on the role of contractors as the Defense Department meets the government commitment to move all personnel out of Iraq by December 31, 2011. The Commission was primarily interested in whether the contractor community was shrinking in proportion to the military presence in country, and whether there is appropriate oversight for watching those ratios in the future.

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The third session was a follow-up to an August hearing of the Commission looking at the interaction of the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Contract Audit Agency. The two agencies have been working together to improve their oversight of the business systems and internal controls of the companies they do business with. The witnesses included Shay Assad, Acting Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (AT&L); Charlie Williams Jr, Director of the Defense Contract Management Agency; and April Stephenson, Director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency.

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