Comment by warner25 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by warner25 | Hacker News Reader

Just to provide a ground-level insider perspective: We've been doing things in the name of "audit readiness" for a decade, and I just... don't get it. It has translated to a lot of asinine things like

1. Making sure that everyone's marriage certificates and kids' birth certificates are on-file, to root out maybe the one person in 10,000 who is erroneously getting paid an extra $200 per month for certain entitlements.

2. Making sure that when we sign leave forms (i.e. requests for vacation time) we do so with a digital signature (even though they got printed out for processing and archival) using a certain image instead of a manual signature with a pen.

3. Going through an absurdly painful process to put on the books every physical piece of property we see (e.g. hand tools, step ladders, obsolete radio and telephone equipment) and then account for them on a monthly basis even if they've been useless and in storage since the 1970s.

Meanwhile, I can see tens or hundreds of billions of dollars of seemingly wasted man-hours on various initiatives (including those listed above), unnecessary personnel moves / rotations, and questionable purchases of new uniforms, equipment, vehicles, software, etc.

I'm not an insider, but those sound like generally hard-to-avoid issues of large organizations, public and private, profit-oriented and service-oriented. You can't manage that many people, millions in DoD, without rules, and rules can't be defined to apply well to the very wide variety of situations in reality - just like an algorithm, they'll be inflexible. These kind of gripes are, understandably, in every large organization.

> 3. Going through an absurdly painful process to put on the books every physical piece of property we see (e.g. hand tools, step ladders, obsolete radio and telephone equipment) and then account for them on a monthly basis even if they've been useless and in storage since the 1970s.

On the upside, that provides one of the benefits of an audit: Identifying wasted assets. I know the Army is focusing on reducing the amount of useless equipment it warehouses.

Stuff is cheap... there's been immense value in having tons of old cheap assets to throw into Ukraine. And even if it isn't dirt-cheap, there's value in maintaining industrial military production capacity.

Corporations got incredibly fragile supply chains by optimizing for JIT asset delivery, let's not repeat the mistake with national defense. I don't want the US to run out of vehicles, artillery shells, and spare uniforms 2 weeks into a real war.

Yeah, it just seems like we've spent an inordinate amount of time on things that would either (1) save what amounts to peanuts in the context of the Army and DoD budgets or (2) not save any money at all.

I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road, like you said about warehouse storage space(?).

I'd rather see a number of "elephant in the room" programs ruthlessly cut, or processes changed, to start saving many billions of dollars now.

>I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road

That's right - the, not unreasonable basis, is that you can't make informed decisions about whether you're getting good value for money, or how to change allocations, unless you've transparency into what that money actually does.

It's approximately the same reason why financial statements and their audits are relevant in the private sector - just substitute "investors" for the "the public, with Congress as proxy".

Also, audits are not 100% about saving money. They're also there to enforce conformity to standard accounting practices and try to make sure the books aren't getting cooked. Even if the books aren't getting cooked the only way you can be sure of that is to go through the audit process.

> like you said about warehouse storage space(?).

I think that's about much more than space, and more the operational drag of managing all that stuff.

Here's the Army Undersecretary and also the Chief of Staff talking about it and plans to reduce inventory:

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/10/army-doesnt-know-w...

From the article:

“I'm working really hard with Army Materiel Command to find ways to more rapidly and in the digital fashion to catalog what we currently have, not relying on the clipboard and supply soldier who's sitting there taking notes and putting it on a piece of paper,”

Yikes.

Oh yeah, when I was a platoon leader and company commander, we spent 20-30% of our time - like a day per week, or a week per month - just looking for stuff, counting stuff, and annotating on paper the locations of the stuff (e.g. which building, office, shipping container) to help us find it again next time.

But you also weren't allowed to get rid of any of it, even if it was obsolete and just hanging around since the 1970s like I said earlier.

All of that sounds like bog standard kinds of stuff that we and every other private company have to go through during our annual audits. I don't totally understand why these things are so burdensome to DoD personnel that they can't pass an audit. I would have been fired a long time ago if our company regularly failed audits over this kind of stuff.

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