THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, December 19, 1994 TAG: 9412160036
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Letter
LENGTH: Short : 38 lines
I am absolutely incensed by the comments of the commander of the Navy Exchange Command (``Navy credit program backfires,'' news, Dec. 11). ``The Navy acknowledged the problem and blames sloppy accounting. If you saw the back rooms you would be appalled because everything you did was on a white piece of paper they literally stuck into shoe boxes. . . . The thing was totally manual, and the ground rules were very foolish. . . . There was great potential for error in that manual system.''
Let's call it what it really is: Sloppy management and lack of proper oversight. It's easy to blame a program's failure on ``bookkeeping,'' but if management had been involved and the proper program reviews had been conducted, the weaknesses in internal control would have been identified before the program was implemented.
The excuses in your article sound like an inspector general's report from the 1950s. White pieces of paper? Shoe boxes?
The Navy has been automated for 30 years, even though the state-of-the-art automation came only recently.
I was in Navy Financial Management for 26 years. I am embarrassed for the professionalism of the Navy Supply Corps after reading comments as misguided as the ones in this article.
The bottom line is poor management foresight and lack of internal controls, not poor bookkeeping. To say otherwise is to confuse the effect with the cause!
J. E. REAGAN
Captain, U.S. Navy (ret.)
Norfolk, Dec. 12, 1994 by CNB