The U.S. Air Force (USAF) has been deploying a modernized financial system since 2005, but the service branch has yet to create a migration plan to guide transition from the legacy system to the more modern one, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a new report.
“The Air Force has not followed leading practices, such as developing a migration plan to guide its transition from the existing legacy system” to the new Defense Enterprise Accounting and Management System (DEAMS), GAO said in the report. “Instead, the Air Force decided to pursue a dual processing policy in which the legacy and target systems would both continue to operate for at least the next 10 years.”
GAO said that using the legacy systems means that resolving deficiencies would be delayed for several years, and that internal control weaknesses would also persist.
GAO made four recommendations to USAF, which the service branch agreed to:
- Develop a systems migration plan based on leading migration practices for a timely transition from the General Accounting and Finance System-Reengineered environment to the DEAMS system;
- During future DEAMS upgrades, USAF “should minimize the number of reports, interfaces, conversions, and extensions modifications and instead maximize the centralized functionality and capabilities of the target accounting system to reengineer business processes”;
- Ensure future financial system upgrades are planned to address identified deficiencies and provide functionality to promote USAF compliance with “Federal financial management system requirements, applicable Federal accounting standards, and the U.S. Standard General Ledger at the transaction level”; and
- Develop “a comprehensive strategy with appropriate performance metrics and consideration of a concept of operations, for its entire financial management systems modernization effort in support of the financial statement audit.”
