Pentagon Plans to Triple Audits Amid Surge in Defense Spending
A surge of defense spending is prompting the Pentagon’s audit agency to triple the number of evaluations it will undertake in order to uncover or prevent unjustified profits based on incomplete, flawed or inaccurate cost data.
The Defense Contract Audit Agency intends to complete as many as 60 Truth In Negotiations Act reviews in the coming fiscal year, compared to about 20 in the year ending Sept. 30, according to spokesman Christopher Sherwood. The agency completed 21 such audits in 2018 and 26 in 2017. About half the reviews focused on the top 25 defense contractors.
President Donald Trump’s efforts to bolster defense spending were aided by Congress’s decision to revise spending caps for the final two years of the 2011 Budget Control Act. That effectively added tens of billions of dollars potential defense spending to the Pentagon budget: $90.3 billion in fiscal year 2020 and $81.3 billion in the following year.
Previous reviews show there’s reason to be concerned. As an example, Shay Assad, the Pentagon’s former director of defense pricing and contracting, said evaluations during his tenure showed that essentially 100% of the contracts examined at one top-25 defense contractor had suspect pricing. “If one looks deep enough there is some element of fraud typically lurking,” he said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-13/pentagon-plans-to-triple-audits-amid-surge-in-defense-spending?srnd=politics-vp