Auditors review wing processes, save money

Published Nov. 24, 2009
By Staff Sgt. Angelique N. Smythe
451st Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs

KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan -- They're here to see how they can save the Air Force money, make sure taxpayers are getting their money's worth, and prevent excessive amounts from being spent.

Three auditors sent by the Air Force Central Command to Kandahar Airfield have been assigned here for six weeks to look into how money has been spent on commercial tender, deployed assets and air traffic control equipment.

One auditor, Amy Johnson, is here to observe whether or not cargo is being tendered on commercial flights when they could have gone on military cargo flights instead.

"A lot of them are going out empty and we're paying for services, such as FEDEX or DHL, to take cargo we could have taken," she said.

Pam Lewers is making sure every piece of deployed asset or equipment is on an accountability list.

"I'm making sure it's not just sitting out there and we can't see it or we don't know that it's there," Ms. Lewers said.

And Brittany Hargis is looking at the maintenance of air traffic control equipment here.

"I've been dealing a lot with contractors," she said. "There are issues on Kandahar as far as this being a NATO base and NATO taking over contracts, so I'm basically looking at the contract oversight for air traffic control."

This is one of nine teams that have gone to different bases throughout the area of responsibility. Each team consists of two to five personnel.

"We all go out as a team and we branch out; everybody's doing the same audits at the same time," said Ms. Johnson. "Then we'll go back to Germany where we'll all meet together, and then all the reports will go back."

Auditors visit deployed locations just about every other rotation. They come out to look at changes made since previous rotations or whatever commanders request that they look into.

"For instance, if an organization finds something could be wrong, such as missing money, they could ask us to go in and basically get all the documentation and all the backup information for them to pursue with their case," Ms. Lewers said. "That could be a commander's request."

Based on documentation and supportive information, the auditors figure out how much money they could potentially save the Air Force, also known as potential monetary benefit. Over the last six rotations, they have had $1.1 billion in PMB.

"I've just looked at 40 different flights that have gone out, and we could have saved approximately $300,000, so that would be projected out based on the sample that we took in from everything they're doing," said Ms. Johnson. "Then we project it out for the six-year defense plan and say you could have saved X million dollars for this base."

"It gets into the millions and millions," said Ms. Lewers. "And it's not just a magic number we throw out there; we actually have to have documentation that can support and back up everything that we do."

And that is why it takes them so long to do a complete audit ... well, not as long as the usual three to four months, which they've condensed to six weeks for deployed locations. The team arrived here Oct. 23 and is scheduled to leave the first week of December.

Ms. Hargis said she thinks their main challenge in the AOR is just getting their work done without interrupting the mission of the wing, being flexible, and being able to accomplish what they need to do without causing a lot of interruption or disruption to the wing while still adding value, without taking up too much of the Airmen's time.

Both Ms. Johnson and Ms. Lewers agreed.

The auditors always announce their audits so everyone at least knows they're on the way. One thing Ms. Lewers said she often notices is that people try to clean up when they find out the auditors are coming, but it doesn't really help them.

"We never really look at what's going on right now," she said. "We look at stuff that's been going on to see where they're at. So they can never really clean up what we're coming out to look at."

The auditors look at the work station's regulations and make sure they're doing as directed. Unless the Airmen have a better way of performing the job, which is usually taken into consideration, issues arise when regulations are disregarded just for the simple fact of not wanting to do it as was specified in the regulations.

"We try to look at processes and tell people where their shortfalls are, what they're doing well and how they can improve," said Ms. Johnson. "That's why we can go and look at basically any kind of process that the Air Force has, as it's what we're trained to do. We're not functional experts on any one thing, but we are functional experts on processes and how things should flow, as well as, management controls."

The auditors will provide an outbrief to the units before departing to give them a picture of what was discovered. Because they must do several reviews, the unit may receive their actual report within another month and then they must respond to recommendations made by the auditors.

All local reports then get rolled up into what's considered the Blue Book, which is an Air Force-level report. This could take anywhere from six months to one year to become available as anywhere from five to 25 bases may be condensed into one report.

Ms. Johnson and Ms. Lewers are both stationed at Ramstein Air Base, Germany. Ms. Hargis is stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio.

The difference between doing audits here and at homestation is that relationships are already established at their home bases.

"When we go out, people know who we are and we've been to their units, maybe several times, to do a few different things," said Ms. Lewers. "So, when we come here, definitely one of the challenges is getting into the different units and building up some rapport with the commanders, the sergeants, the enlisted, and everybody that we need to talk to. That's a challenge because you just never know what's going on out here or what struggles they're going through. So we try to make it a little bit easier when we come out."

"What's different between homestation and the AOR is the continuity," said Ms. Hargis. "Rotations here only last four to six months and people don't necessarily do the same things at their homestations. And maybe they're not quite sure what the process is, so it forces us to really focus on putting processes in place versus fixing the couple mistakes that we identify and looking at the overall cause for the process."

The auditors said the success of the mission here comes from building relationships, accepting feedback and having good communication. They want everyone to know that they're here to help make processes better, so giving feedback as well as receiving feedback from clients are both just as important.

"Everybody's really receptive to audits here, which you don't always find at bases you go to," said Ms. Lewers. "They're all open to improving whatever it is that needs to be improved, whatever we're looking at, and that's always good for us."