WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — The GAO found that the US Army was not following the Defense Department’s guidance for reporting costs on leases that have multiple assets associated with them, the report pointed out.
"GAO found that about 15 percent of the RPAD [Real Property Assets Database] lease records for fiscal year 2011 and 10 percent of the records for fiscal year 2013 were inaccurate," the report, issued on Tuesday, said. "Most of these errors were in the lease records for the Army."
The US Department of Defense cannot fully determine the number, size and costs of its leases for real property because its database contains inaccurate and incomplete data, the GAO explained.
"GAO conducted a random sample of the fiscal year 2013 RPAD data and found that the data element required to calculate costs was unreliable for 11 of the 84 Army sample records," the report noted.
Overreliance on costly leasing is one of the major reasons that federal real property management remains on GAO's high-risk list, the report concluded.
