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GAO-05-87R 1 (2004-11-29)

handle is hein.gao/gaocrptaqru0001 and id is 1 raw text is: Aountability * Integrity * Rellab~ltty United States Government Accountability Office Washington, DC 20548 November 29, 2004 The Honorable Donald H. Rumsfeld Secretary of Defense Subject: Military Personnel: DOD Needs to Strengthen the Annual Review and Certification of Military Personnel Obligations Dear Mr. Secretary: Each year, Congress appropriates billions of dollars to pay and support U.S. military personnel at home and overseas. In fiscal year 2003, military personnel (MILPERS) appropriations amounted to more than $109 billion. Once the funds are appropriated, the military services are responsible for ensuring that the funds are properly obligated and disbursed. Their efforts include conducting an annual review and certification to ensure that obligations are still needed in the amounts and for the purposes obligated and that disbursements are supported by a proper obligation of funds. The end-of-the-fiscal-year review is critical to the next year's budget formulation process because the services use the obligations for the most recent fiscal year completed as a point of reference in developing their new budgets, and Congress uses this information as a point of comparison in its review of the new budget requests. In our prior work for the House and Senate appropriation and authorization committees, reviewing the services' budget justifications, we found that although the services were conducting annual reviews and certifications, the services did not review transactions by matching obligations to individual disbursements in all of the years that disbursements can occur, as required by the Department of Defense (DOD) Financial Management Regulation.2 We also found that the services disbursed some obligations for purposes other than those reported in their budget submission, but their year-end reviews did not show how these funds were actually disbursed. Specifically, the year-end reviews did not 1 MILPERS appropriations are used for pay, benefits, incentives, allowances, housing, subsistence, travel for military personnel, and reserve training. 2 DOD 7000.14-R, vol. 3, chapter 8, paragraph 080402.B(2), November 2000; chapter 11, paragraph 110301, January 2001. GAO-05-87R Military Personnel Page I

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