Evaluating the Defense Contract Auditing Process

Abstract

Industry recognizes that the audit responsibilities of the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) play an essential role within the Department of Defense's (DoD) acquisition oversight structure and that it operates within a broader set of controls to manage DoD's activities throughout the contracting lifecycle. I would like to make clear that many of the observations that follow have their genesis in the evolution of DCAA from the organization stood up in 1965 to serve as an advisory function for Contracting Officer(CO) decision making to one that has been reconfigured to serve solely as enforcers of their own process requirements without a nexus to the CO decision making process.