The Air Force is at a moderate risk of missing the 2017 deadline for military services and the Defense Department to achieve a clean audit, Air Force comptroller Jamie Morin said during a Sept. 8 House hearing.

Before a House Armed Services Committee panel of defense financial management and auditability reform, Morin said the risk comes in part from challenges in modernizing information technology systems. The Air Force, like other military services, is in the midst of replacing its collection of legacy systems with massive enterprise resource planning software.

"In the early stages of the Air Force audit readiness effort, we perhaps bit off a bit more than we could chew with some of those systems modernizations," Morin said, pointing to the Expeditionary Combat Support System as an example. ECSS, the general ledger for Air Force working capital funds and the property system of record for operating materials and military equipment, was meant to replace 240 legacy systems.

"That was probably too much scope," Morin said. Trying to replace that many systems at once strained planning and execution capabilities, Morin said, leading the Air Force to scale down software releases into smaller increments.

In order to get a clean audit, the Air Force will in some cases make further investments in legacy systems rather than shut them down, Morin also said.

The service, Morin acknowledged, is behind the other military services in ERP implementation, "but that's been a benefit, in many respects, because we've been able to learn lessons from the experiences the other services have gone through." Those lessons learned have led the Air Force to pay special attention to data clean up, to feeder systems and to change management for users, he added. 

The Army, meanwhile, will test its General Fund Enterprise Business System ERP against Government Accountability Office standards in December.

"GFEBS is working. There are no data integrity problems," said Sally Matiella, the Army comptroller. "We do have to maybe slice and dice the data within GFEBS into different accounts, but we believe it's going to work," she added. The Defense Department office of inspector general said in July the system is at high risk of running even more over schedule and budget.

In response to a question about shutting off legacy systems, Navy Comptroller Gladys Commons said the Navy will keep some legacy systems going rather than convert the data from them. Shipbuilding appropriations, for example, is a 5-year appropriation and can extend as much as 10 to 12 years, Commons said. "We chose in some instances to keep that information in the legacy system until such time as those appropriations spend out," she told the panel, since data conversion is expensive.

For more:
- go to the hearing webpage (prepared testimonies and webcast available)

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