Air force accounting and finance office.

In the future, financial services will dominate the earth; it will be global, electronic, and unrecognizable from today. This is a quote from the book Gaining Competitive Advantage by Thomas Faranda. Although Mr Faranda is speaking primarily of financial services in the commercial market place, this applies to government as well. Everyday, we are becoming more businesslike and have begun to aggressively pursue commercial off-the-shelf business solutions to our processes and systems. If we turn back the hands of time 15 years, our financial services were considerably different from what they are today. Change now is more revolutionary and thus takes place at a much faster pace--five years from now our financial services delivery systems will be, and should be, unrecognizable compared to today's standards. The areas I'm referring to run the gambit from E-Government with a full range of electronic and automated processes to a complete shift in the Air Force culture in how we conduct customer service. The basic services we now perform over the counter will quickly become a thing of the past and members will complete these transactions themselves over the Internet, similar to what many top businesses are already doing today. We would like to move quickly to full enterprise systems for our accounting and disbursing processes and eliminate the numerous manual touches and unreliable financial reporting. In some instances, these changes are already in progress and well on the way to fruition. In other instances, they are still conceptual and in the developmental stage, but its just a matter of time before they become an every day reality! None of us have a corner on the market for brains, so we need your ideas, your energy, and, most importantly, your unrelenting leadership to smartly bring about this kind of change and transformation.

The changes we are discussing here impact the entire Air Force and not just the FM community. However, it's imperative that FM be leading from the front and driving the culture changes for the rest of the force. We have to set the example; we have to lead by example; we have to set a fast pace for the rest of the force in embracing these concepts--transform our mindset first ... then the rest of the Air Force! Our workplace has changed and will continue to change dramatically ... global technology is reinventing opportunities daily. Another profound maxim from Mr Faranda: what was, isn't any more; what is, won't be for long. We are beginning to see this everyday in our professional and personal Jives. I encourage each of you to embrace this dynamic time in our history and take advantage of the numerous opportunities to be on the leading edge of making a significant difference in the way we will conduct business in the future. Our front line troops in Iraq showed true leadership and set a pretty high standard for getting the job done right. We now need to follow that lead and get things done right in our business areas as well. Let's now take a look at the issues on the AFAFO homefront:

Accounting Division. At our request, the Air Force Audit Agency (AFAA) conducted the first audit of our base-level Quality Assurance Program (QAP) since its inception over five years ago. As in many other areas, we knew we faced challenges caused by inexperience in the field. The audit will help us focus on where to concentrate our training efforts to get this critical program back on track. Specifically, the self inspection program administration, application of fraud prevention measures, in-house training oversight, and compliance with the Comptroller Access Guide required improvement. The AFAFO will be contacting and working with each of your QAMs to improve the Self Inspection Program and the QA AFI in parallel with the SAF/FM End-to-End Governance and FM Knowledge Management Concept transformation initiatives. A good Quality Assurance Program can make or break an organization--we can ill afford a lacking program during these critical times of change and transformation.

Kudos to everyone on your follow-up to GAFS/BQ access between Air Force installations! AFAA outbriefed SAF/FM on the results of the audit on BQ transactions entered by one station into the database of another station inside the same DFAS Field Site. Overall, it's a good news story because there was no evidence of fraud and the auditors praised our detection tool, the BQ-ILC-RPT retrieval, and encouraged its wider use. Continue to work the retrieval and follow-ups on erroneous inputs into your database before it negatively impacts your funding and accounting reports.

In the area of interest penalty payments (IPPs) for vendor pay, we are still on track for making the 40% reduction mandated by the OSD Comptroller (USD(C)). Through April 2003, vendor pay IPPs were a little over $1.8M--which, if projected out, would put us real close to the goal of approximately $3.1M for FY03. Unfortunately, the Air Force is still responsible for almost 60% of this interest in the form of late receiving reports and late certified invoices. AETC, due to their successful Joint Policy and Procedures Committee and implementation of Wide Area Work Flow-Receipt and Acceptance (WAWF-RA), are reaping big benefits. Across the Air Force, we are still over $200 IPPs per million dollars disbursed; however, AETC is leading the way with only $75 IPPs per million for April 2003 (AETC in April 2002 was over $300 per million). The bottom line is the more we can reduce IPPs, the more money your commanders have for warfighting and quality of life issues.

Unfortunately, we are not on track to make the USD(C) 40% reduction mandate in the Contract Pay area. Contract Pay consists of contracts paid out of MOCAS by DFAS-Columbus. The interest on these contracts is centrally funded by SAF/FM, therefore does not have quite the bite on wing commanders funds as does Vendor Pay. Nonetheless, these IPP dollars still take away from the overall mission of the Air Force. Key decisions made in the mid-90's on the Gunship contract (dating back to 1988) resulted in IPPs paid in 2003 that have caused us to already exceed the 40% reduction goal.

Additionally, we recently partnered with DFAS-DE to reengineer the triannual review process. Thanks to each of the MAJCOMs that provided feedback to help us make this a more useful tool for cleaning up our accounting records. This will ultimately assist the AF in obtaining an unqualified audit opinion on the Statement of Budgetary Resources (SBR). The tri-annual review is also a small, but important piece of the SAF/FM strategic plan to obtain an unqualified opinion in FY04 on all reports. One of the proposed ideas is to focus each review to different years of money. For example, the first review will consist of canceling year funds, the second review will consist of expiring year funds, and the third review will be the current year funds. We often hear that the FSOs/RAs have to look at the same lines on each review--separating the review into different years of money should reduce this complaint and reduce some workload. Other proposals include expanding the reason codes for action taken and ultimately creating a web-based system where everyone can see what the other is doing and reduce duplication of work. We will provide a proposed plan for MAJCOM comments/approval and hopefully implement effective with the first review in FY04.

Finance Division. We have been working hard to improve the quality of life for our members and are proud to report we recently implemented a couple of changes that are paying huge dividends. One such change was automation of the process for members to request travel accrual payments. Using a web-site designed by the Ramstein AB FSO as a benchmark, we worked with AFPC to automate the request process using the Virtual MPF (vMPF). Members with access to the web may now submit their accrual request via the vMPF. The member simply logs in, fills out an accrual worksheet, selects his/her home-station, and selects submit. The request is sent electronically to the home-station FSO organization e-mail account. The process is much easier than faxing requests, especially in deployed locations where access to the web is often more readily available than access to a fax machine. This is a great service to our members, plus should be easier for our FSOs as well. Currently, only military members can use the procedure by accessing the vMPF. We are working to automate the process for civilian travelers as well, using the vCPF and hope to have that done in the near future.

The other customer service change we implemented was to start payment of Family Separation Allowance (FSA) for members TDY more than 30 days at the 30-day point based on competent orders rather than delaying payment until the member returned to home-station. While this change does not ease the workload on our FSOs, it does provide better service to our members. The intent of FSA is to help defray the added expense of a member being separated from his or her family for an extended period of time. The previous policy of delaying payment until the member returned from the TDY defeated the purpose of the entitlement and equated to holding the member's pay hostage. Rave reviews were received on this initiative and it helped to improved morale for our warfighters during the recent conflict, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM.