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GAO-20-391R 1 (2020-02-12)

handle is hein.gao/gaobaeaqi0001 and id is 1 raw text is: G A U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE 441 G St. N.W. Washington, DC 20548 February 12, 2020 Congressional Committees GAO Audits Involving DOD: Status of DOD's Efforts to Schedule and Hold Timely Entrance Conferences The Government Accountability Office's (GAO) agency protocols govern our relationships with audited entities. These protocols, coordinated with federal agencies including the Department of Defense (DOD), require agencies to assist us in scheduling an entrance conference within 14 calendar days of receiving notice of a new audit.1 The entrance conference provides us an opportunity to communicate our audit objectives and enables agencies to assign key points of contact to support our work. In past years, DOD has experienced difficulty meeting the protocol target for the timely facilitation of entrance conferences. In Senate Report 116-48 accompanying a bill for the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, the Senate Armed Services Committee included a provision for us to review DOD's timely scheduling and holding of entrance conferences. This report evaluates the extent to which DOD scheduled entrance conferences within 14 days, consistent with our protocols, and also held those conferences within 30 days. To address our objective, we collected and analyzed data on GAO audits involving DOD that were initiated in the first quarter of fiscal year 2020, October 1, 2019 through December 31, 2019. This is the first of four reports that we will produce on this topic for fiscal year 2020. Specifically, we determined the number of notification letters requesting entrance conferences that we sent to DOD from October 1, 2019 through December 31, 2019. We also reviewed data collected by DOD on entrance conference requests to ensure data consistency. We defined the date an entrance conference was scheduled as the date the relevant GAO team received a communication, such as an email, appointment, or telephone call from DOD, stating that an entrance conference had been scheduled. We then analyzed the data to determine the number of days between when DOD received the notification letter for each new audit and when DOD scheduled the entrance conference and assessed whether DOD scheduled entrance conferences within 14 days of notification, which is the time frame identified in our protocols. We also determined the date that each requested entrance conference was held (i.e., actually occurred) by collecting this information from the relevant GAO team for each audit and assessed whether DOD held entrance conferences for new audits within 30 days of notification, which was the time frame identified in the mandate for this review. We conducted this performance audit from September 2019 to February 2020 in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe that the evidence 1GAO, GAO's Agency Protocols, GAO-19-55G (Washington, D.C.: Jan. 23, 2019). GAO-20-391 R GAO Audits Involving DOD Page 1

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