Complexity in an Unexpected Place: Quantities in Selected Acquisition Reports
https://www.dau.edu
Acquisition data are primarily about a few questions: “How much funding? Howmany are we getting?When are we obligating the funds? And when arewe gettingwhat we paid for?” All of these questions are interesting, and none is straightforward. Most have been addressed elsewhere and continue to garner attention. However, the question of “What are we getting?” is generally treated as though it were simple. Our experience tells us that counting quantities is often not straightforward. This article describes research fndings that have taken us deeper into this question, showing that quantities are almost always complicated. The Director of Performance Assessments and Root Cause Analyses (D,PARCA) 1 asked the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) to review the quality and utility of data used for acquisition oversight; we started with the question of quantities. Acquisition Reports Title 10 U.S.C. § 2432 (Selected Acquisition Reports, 2019) requires the Secretary of Defense to submit to the Congress a yearly status report for each Major Defense Acquisition Program (MDAP), known as the Selected Acquisition Report (SAR), which provides performance, schedule, and cost data. Each SAR includes separate cost estimates for several categories. Both past actual costs and future anticipated costs are reported, as well as quantity of units for the expected life of the program (Department of Defense [DoD], 2016). Within the Defense Acquisition Management Information Retrieval (DAMIR) system—the repository for SAR data—the Track to Budget section identifes the budget programelements (PE) or line itemnumbers (LIN) for each appropriation associated with a program in a particular fscal year (FY), allowing the user to fnd the equivalent cost and quantity data in the President’s Budget (PB) Submission prepared in the same year. 2 Reconciling SAR data with the equivalent PB Submission proves
difcult, however, as cost estimates can vary between the two sources, and some PEs and LINs are shared among multiple programs in a nontransparent way. In some cases, the SARandPBdefne quantities diferently.
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Defense ARJ, January 2020, Vol. 27No. 1 : 28-59
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