DCAA’s backlog of audits continues to skyrocket, even with the addition of staff. Since 2008 the DCAA has added 577 employees, but last year only completed a quarter of the audits that it did in 2008. How is the DCAA adding employees but becoming less efficient? If you ask the DCAA they are actually becoming more efficient, claiming that they are being more thorough in their audit assignments. In being more thorough the DCAA believes that they will save more money per audit and still be able to perform all the proper audits within the 6 year limitation.
Richard Loeb, a former federal procurement official, believes that the longer the DCAA allows audits to sit the greater the chance that the US government and tax payers will lose billions of dollars. Richard believes the longer these audits sit around the harder it becomes to track information and people. The DCAA says that it is prioritizing the oldest audits so that they will be done within the 6 years, although prioritizing these audits may not take employee and management turnover into consideration.
Some believe that the bigger issue that the DCAA has is the lack of audits done after the contract has been awarded. $9.6 Billion of the $12 billion that auditors questioned in audits was on forward pricing audits. This is great that they are questioning a high percentage of the money pre-reward, but why aren’t they doing as much work auditing post-reward?