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DCAA Audit Backlog


Guest Vern Edwards

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Guest Vern Edwards
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GAO found that in fiscal year 2016, DCAA averaged 885 days from when a contractor submitted an adequate incurred cost proposal to when the audit was completed. The lag was due to limited availability of DCAA staff to begin audit work, as it took DCAA an average of 138 days to complete the actual audit work....

See Additional Management Attention and Action Needed to Close Contracts and Reduce Audit Backlog, GAO Report 17-738, September 2017. I could not determine if the number of days were woking days or calendar days.

 

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Vern, I'm fairly sure they are calendar days but it doesn't really matter, does it? DCAA productivity, as measured by the agency's own published statistics, is abysmally lower than it was a decade or more ago.

To me, the interesting aspect of the GAO report was the discussion of "low-risk" audits. Those are audits that are not performed, but claimed as being completed audits. DCAA stated that performing audits on small dollar-value submissions isn't a good use of taxpayer funds. DCAA is "completing" such assignments at a 2-for-1 rate against full-scope, GAGAS-compliant, incurred cost audits. In other words, for every full-scope audit the agency completes, it issues two non-audit completion memoranda. That's why the backlog drops even though it takes nearly three years to audit one year.

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H2H identified the problem as one of productivity.  DCAA was actually doing more with fewer auditors ten years ago.  However, in 2008, GAO issued a report on DCAA compliance with GAGAS stating that DCAA audit files did not contain sufficient evidence to support the audit conclusions stated in audit reports.  As a result, DCAA changed its approach and now demands more and more from contractors in the way of support for costs claimed and business systems.  This leave no stone unturned approach has dramatically reduced productivity without an increase in the usefulness of audit reports to contracting officers.  In fact, there have been later GAO reports that indicate that DCAA audit reports are not useful to contracting officers because they are issued too late or cause delay in recovering money owed to the government.

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We just went through several years worth of ICS audits.

This was through a private consultancy working on behalf of dcaa.

Took about 45 days for us to correct initial deficiencies in our proposals and for them to be deemed adequate.

What retread said is right on. No stone is left unturned. The business systems check was pretty rigorous and high, high volumes of backup support. 

Once our proposals were deemed adequate it was ten months. The idea of it taking three times as long via a dcaa audit could drive one insane

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  • 4 weeks later...
1 hour ago, lotus said:

Perhaps there should be a default acceptance time.  If the audit is not completed by X days after submission, the ICS is deemed accepted as submitted.

There is, although enforced rather sporadically by the courts. It's called the statute of limitations, as found in the Contract Disputes Act.

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