Military Personnel: DMDC Data on Officers' Commissioning Programs is Insufficiently Reliable and Needs to be Corrected

On January 19, 2007, we issued a report on officer accessions, retention, and foreign language training. The purpose of this report is to bring to your attention reliability issues with DMDC data that we encountered while preparing our report and to provide you with our recommendations to address these issues. We found the information that DMDC provided to us on the number of officers accessed from DODs various commissioning programs to be insufficiently reliable for use in our January 2007 report. Government auditing standards, which are applicable to all federal agencies including DOD, require that data be valid and reliable when the data are significant to the auditors findings. More specifically, federal internal control standards require that data control activities, such as edit checks, verification, and reconciliation, be conducted and documented to help provide reasonable assurance that agency objectives are being met. We found discrepancies when we compared the DMDC-provided information on the number of officers accessed from DODs commissioning programs the academies, ROTC, and OCSOTS to information provided by the services.