FORT BELVOIR, Va. –
The work of a task force created in October 2018 to synchronize audit-readiness efforts and drive the agency toward achieving a clean audit opinion on DLA’s financial statements realigned Sept. 30 under Defense Logistics Agency Finance.
“The Audit Task Force served a valuable purpose and there’s no question it helped the agency find its way forward, but most of the functions are organic to DLA Finance,” said DLA Finance Deputy Director Jeff Zottola. “Task forces are established with a shelf life in mind as a general rule, and the conditions are right for us to fold the mission back into DLA Finance where we’re focused on audit response and audit compliance.”
Cross-functional teams and enterprise business process owners will continue to be responsible for developing policies and procedures that support corrective action plans in their areas, he added.
DLA Finance plans to replicate the Audit Task Force’s Program Management Office to manage taskings and workloads, some of which span multiple process areas and parts of the agency.
“The program office and cross-functional teams were absolutely essential in terms of communicating with all the different stakeholders and ensuring that numerous reporting requirements were always met whether that was internal governance or external governance,” Zottola said.
He also credited the task force for providing a common, agencywide view of the agency’s audit efforts and for resulting in solutions to some deficiencies.
Dissolving the task force isn’t a sign that DLA’s audit work is nearing completion or that DLA’s commitment to audit readiness is waning, he added.
“DLA absolutely still places an incredible importance on the financial statement audit, so much so that it’s part of our Strategic Plan,” he continued. “You can always tell an organization’s real priorities by following the money in terms of establishing priorities and allocating resources, and I think DLA is doing that.”