The Department of the Navy (DON) Office of Financial Management Operations (FMO) has released an audit readiness video as part of its audit readiness program.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has identified improving financial management and achieving audit readiness as a top priority throughout DoD. He has set a goal for the Department of Defense (DoD) to produce certified financial statements by 2017. The Navy’s audit readiness goals were set in a memo from the Under Secretary of the Navy in January 2012.
The video (available on the DON FMO website) addresses the questions of what audit readiness means and why it is important. Navy personnel from all levels and disciplines discuss their initial impressions of audit readiness, what it now means to them and their organizations, how it cuts across all Navy activities, and how they are supporting audit readiness in their jobs.
The FMO website has centralized audit readiness-related material and information in the Audit Readiness Information Center. The Center is a “one-stop-shop for resources and news related to DON’s journey toward audit readiness.”
This site includes briefings, reports, fact sheets, frequently asked questions, congressional testimony, guidance, and other information about training, conferences and workshops, and other audit-related subjects. The website also describes the functions and organization of the Navy’s FMO, which is in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Financial Management and Comptroller.
The video makes it clear that EVERYONE in the Navy, whenever they do something that will result in some kind of financial transaction (Will they always know that is the case?)is expected to make sure (somehow) that their action is accurately documented somewhere and somehow (presumably in some sort of information system), so that financial-statement auditors, as much as a year or more later, will be able to construct “audit trails” that go all the way back down to that transaction allowing them to verity that teh transaction at every step was recorded in conformance to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for accrual-based financial accounting and reporting.
What the video fails utterly to explain is why or how making it possible for financial-statement auditors to do that will help ANY of the people in the video to do their jobs. It is also curious that the video makes no mention whatsoever of the information systems (or system – is it the Navy ERP?) that will allow everyone in the Navy to do what the video is telling them they must do.