DOD Needs to Enforce Its Own RFID Mandate, Says Inspector General

A draft of the report was issued to key officers in the DLA on Aug. 1, 2008, as well as to the Air Force, Army, Navy and Office of the Under Secretary of Defense, in order to collect comments on its findings and recommendations for remedying compliance problems. The final report included the following recommendations:

• The DLA's director and the DOD's deputy undersecretary for logistics and materiel readiness—in coordination with the Army's assistant secretary for acquisition, logistics and technology; the Navy's assistant secretary for research, development and acquisition; and the Air Force's deputy assistant secretary for contracting—should devise a set of consequences for contracting officers failing to comply with RFID requirements. These should include setting metrics and conducting reviews with those officers. The inspector general also urged the DLA to "issue policy requiring that contracting officers be formally trained in RFID; and identify penalties for noncompliant suppliers."
• The operations within the depot operations should include better training and reviewing to ensure RFID shipments are properly handled.
• Depot managers should establish a means of reviewing, reporting and resolving any problems linked to the execution of the RFID-tagging mandate.

In response to the recommendation that additional reviews be instituted to ensure contract officers' compliance, respondents from the Under Secretary of Defense Office and the Defense Logistics Agency wrote that a system-generated check for appropriate contracting clauses would be too burdensome, and that such checks already existed as part of the DLA's and other military agencies' existing contracting review processes. As far as training is concerned, they noted, it is already offered as part of an instructional course that contracting officers are required to take.

In rebuttal, the inspector general requested that officers responding to the report provide recommendations for how often the contractor reviews should take place going forward, as well as the types of metrics that should be established to measure the officers' compliance with the RFID mandate.

The full comments made by the responding officials are published in the report, which also includes a directive to these individuals to clarify their original responses and/or contribute final comments on the Inspector General's findings by Oct. 29, 2008.

The full report (number D-2008-135) can be downloaded from the DOD Office of the Inspector General's Web site.