Air force accounting and finance office

Air Force Comptroller, July, 2003 by L.C. Williams

In the future, financial services will dominate the earth; it will be global, electronic, and unrecognizable from today. This is a quote from the book Gaining Competitive Advantage by Thomas Faranda. Although Mr Faranda is speaking primarily of financial services in the commercial market place, this applies to government as well. Everyday, we are becoming more businesslike and have begun to aggressively pursue commercial off-the-shelf business solutions to our processes and systems. If we turn back the hands of time 15 years, our financial services were considerably different from what they are today. Change now is more revolutionary and thus takes place at a much faster pace--five years from now our financial services delivery systems will be, and should be, unrecognizable compared to today's standards. The areas I'm referring to run the gambit from E-Government with a full range of electronic and automated processes to a complete shift in the Air Force culture in how we conduct customer service. The basic services we now perform over the counter will quickly become a thing of the past and members will complete these transactions themselves over the Internet, similar to what many top businesses are already doing today. We would like to move quickly to full enterprise systems for our accounting and disbursing processes and eliminate the numerous manual touches and unreliable financial reporting. In some instances, these changes are already in progress and well on the way to fruition. In other instances, they are still conceptual and in the developmental stage, but its just a matter of time before they become an every day reality! None of us have a corner on the market for brains, so we need your ideas, your energy, and, most importantly, your unrelenting leadership to smartly bring about this kind of change and transformation.

The changes we are discussing here impact the entire Air Force and not just the FM community. However, it's imperative that FM be leading from the front and driving the culture changes for the rest of the force. We have to set the example; we have to lead by example; we have to set a fast pace for the rest of the force in embracing these concepts--transform our mindset first ... then the rest of the Air Force! Our workplace has changed and will continue to change dramatically ... global technology is reinventing opportunities daily. Another profound maxim from Mr Faranda: what was, isn't any more; what is, won't be for long. We are beginning to see this everyday in our professional and personal Jives. I encourage each of you to embrace this dynamic time in our history and take advantage of the numerous opportunities to be on the leading edge of making a significant difference in the way we will conduct business in the future. Our front line troops in Iraq showed true leadership and set a pretty high standard for getting the job done right. We now need to follow that lead and get things done right in our business areas as well. Let's now take a look at the issues on the AFAFO homefront:

Accounting Division. At our request, the Air Force Audit Agency (AFAA) conducted the first audit of our base-level Quality Assurance Program (QAP) since its inception over five years ago. As in many other areas, we knew we faced challenges caused by inexperience in the field. The audit will help us focus on where to concentrate our training efforts to get this critical program back on track. Specifically, the self inspection program administration, application of fraud prevention measures, in-house training oversight, and compliance with the Comptroller Access Guide required improvement. The AFAFO will be contacting and working with each of your QAMs to improve the Self Inspection Program and the QA AFI in parallel with the SAF/FM End-to-End Governance and FM Knowledge Management Concept transformation initiatives. A good Quality Assurance Program can make or break an organization--we can ill afford a lacking program during these critical times of change and transformation.

Kudos to everyone on your follow-up to GAFS/BQ access between Air Force installations! AFAA outbriefed SAF/FM on the results of the audit on BQ transactions entered by one station into the database of another station inside the same DFAS Field Site. Overall, it's a good news story because there was no evidence of fraud and the auditors praised our detection tool, the BQ-ILC-RPT retrieval, and encouraged its wider use. Continue to work the retrieval and follow-ups on erroneous inputs into your database before it negatively impacts your funding and accounting reports.

In the area of interest penalty payments (IPPs) for vendor pay, we are still on track for making the 40% reduction mandated by the OSD Comptroller (USD(C)). Through April 2003, vendor pay IPPs were a little over $1.8M--which, if projected out, would put us real close to the goal of approximately $3.1M for FY03. Unfortunately, the Air Force is still responsible for almost 60% of this interest in the form of late receiving reports and late certified invoices. AETC, due to their successful Joint Policy and Procedures Committee and implementation of Wide Area Work Flow-Receipt and Acceptance (WAWF-RA), are reaping big benefits. Across the Air Force, we are still over $200 IPPs per million dollars disbursed; however, AETC is leading the way with only $75 IPPs per million for April 2003 (AETC in April 2002 was over $300 per million). The bottom line is the more we can reduce IPPs, the more money your commanders have for warfighting and quality of life issues.