The U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) pledged to this year implement several incremental steps toward a common financial reporting system that Congress has ordered put in place by December, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.
The GAO’s report includes a letter from NNSA Administrator Lisa Gordon-Hagerty describing three steps the agency would take toward that end before the Sept. 30 end of the government fiscal year, plus one it already took.
The NNSA chief did not say whether the agency is on track to finish its common financial reporting system by year’s end, but she affirmed the agency will:
- Develop and implement an internal NNSA process to verify that contractors are “consistently applying common cost element definitions at their sites and across the nuclear security enterprise.”
- Develop and implement a process to verify that vendors are correctly translating their corporate financial reporting records into the format the agency requires under its various site management and operations contracts.
- Expand a program started in fiscal 2019 to track how NNSA management and operations contractors “capture and report financial integration indirect cost data” to also track whether “manual changes” contractors make to their financial data “to reconcile with the Standard Accounting and Reporting System” affects the accuracy of data that could be used for common financial reporting purposes.
Gordon-Hagerty also wrote that the NNSA in 2019 started tracking contractor-requested changes to work breakdown structures: essentially, the to-do lists for a given contractual deliverable to the government.
Congress ordered up the common financial reporting system in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2017. Lawmakers said such a system will help them make apples-to-apples costs comparisons across the entire nuclear security enterprise, which includes eight sites run by a slew of different management and operations contractors. Most contractors are teams with several different corporate parents.
The NNSA has a roughly $17 billion budget for fiscal 2020. The agency relies on contractors to complete the vast bulk of this work.
