GAO Faults NASA Inspector General
Jan 16, 2009
By John M. Doyle and Jefferson Morris
Congressional auditors say NASA isn't getting its money's worth from the investigations carried out by the space agency's inspector general.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, says in a report released Jan. 9 that of the 71 reports issued by NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG) in fiscal years 2006 and 2007, only one had any recommendations on how to save taxpayers' money.
Almost $7 million of the nearly $9 million saved by audits over a five-year period came from just a single audit in 2005, the GAO report stated. Given the OIG's $34 million budget in FY '07, that translates to a return of 36 cents on each dollar spent by the OIG. By contrast, the average return for the other agencies' inspector generals was $9.49 per dollar spent, or 26 times that of the NASA OIG. In FY '07, the NASA OIG ranked 27th out of the 28 agency inspector general offices reporting savings that year. (See charts pp. 6-8.)
The GAO report said one problem the NASA OIG faces is a high turnover rate for experienced audit personnel. The attrition rate at NASA jumped from 12 percent to almost 20 percent from FY '03-'07.
The report prompted criticism on Capitol Hill, especially from Rep. Bart Gordon, (D-Tenn.) chairman of the House Science Committee, which oversees NASA. Noting the Inspector General's role is to reduce waste, Gordon called for the removal of NASA's inspector general, Robert Cobb. "The country can't afford Mr. Cobb," Gordon said.
Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), chairman of the Science Committee's investigations and oversight subcommittee, and Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, also called for Cobb's ouster.
Departing NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said he has no formal comment on the GAO report, but took issue with the idea that NASA knowingly wastes money. As an example, he came to the defense of the Mars Science Laboratory rover mission, which is suffering a costly launch delay due to development problems (Aerospace DAILY, Jan. 14).
"The people who are running Mars Science Lab are really not doing anything significantly wrong," Griffin said during a breakfast in Washington Jan. 13. Although "they didn't do a very good job of estimating what it was going to cost," they have not wasted time and money going down blind alleys, he said. The difficulty, he says, is inherent any time one tries to estimate "what it would cost to do something that no one else has ever done before."
Artist's concept of Mars Science Laboratory rover: NASA.
