Congress Turns its Sights to DCAA Audit Backlog

On October 20, 2017, Senator Claire McCaskill, Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, issued a letter to David Norquist, Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer requesting “detailed information” about the Defense Contract Audit Agency’s audit backlog, in what appears to be a follow up to the September 2017 GAO Report (discussed here), which found that “DCAA failed to meet its original goal of eliminating the backlog of audits more than two years old” by the end of Fiscal Year 2016 – a goal that DCAA now believes “will be challenging to meet” by the end of Fiscal Year 2018. The letter asked DoD to provide a written response by November 10, 2017 regarding: (1) DCAA’s “current inventory of incurred cost audits”; (2) “the plans and expected timeline for reducing DCAA’s audit backlog to 18 months of inventory”; and (3) the current status and timeline for DoD to complete its “plans to assess and implement options for reducing the length of time to begin incurred cost audit work,” and “conduct a comprehensive analysis regarding the use and effect of multi-year audits by March 31, 2018.”