By Nick Schwellenbach
Every Friday, POGO will strive to make one document available that we or others have obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), especially documents that have not previously been posted online. Some of these documents will be more important than others, some may only be of historical interest— although relevance is in the eye of the beholder. POGO is doing this to highlight the importance of open government and FOIA throughout the year.
This week’s document: Audit report: “Foreign Language Program Training and Proficiency” (browse the document below)
Document agency: U.S. Army Audit Agency
Document number: A-2010-0141-ZBI
Document date: July 22, 2010
In a nutshell: There’s ample room for improvement in the Army’s foreign language program.
Quick background on military audit agencies: The Department of Defense has numerous oversight agencies with responsibilities similar to those of the Inspectors General (IGs). These Pentagon oversight agencies, however, operate under a different set of rules than the IGs, which have a statutory basis in the Inspector General Act of 1978.
Among the differences is that military audit agencies (except for the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG), which is a “statutory IG”) generally do not proactively make their reports available to the public on their websites.
It’s a shame that most of these reports never see the light of day. The good work of legions of military service auditors rarely gets the same kind of leverage to pressure the military services to change as work done by statutory IGs or the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which can benefit from the shaming effect of publicity.
This isn’t a minor point: within the Defense Department, the military audit agencies usually produce more audit reports than the DoD OIG each year.
Even the lists of audit reports by military audit agencies are not generally available, unless they are themselves requested through FOIA (a notable exception is the Naval Audit Service, which does make its list of audit reports available). The website governmentattic.org, which is an excellent resource by the way, has published a list of all Army Audit Agency reports from 1997 through most of 2010.
Highlights from this week's document:
- “We concluded the Army needed to improve the process for identifying recruits with an aptitude to learn a foreign language, resulting in selection for foreign language training. Our analyses showed that only 68.3 percent of FY 09 graduation candidates at [Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center] DLIFLC completed course requirements, and only 55.6 percent achieved a minimum proficiency score. This occurred, in part, because the test used to assess recruits’ aptitude for learning a foreign language (developed by DOD and DLIFLC) wasn’t effective.” (page 2 of 44)
- “We also concluded the Army needed to change its methodology for estimating the number of training spaces it needed at DLIFLC. Our analyses showed that the Army filled only 74 percent of the spaces it paid for in FY 09 and only 73 percent in FY 08. This occurred because responsible personnel relied solely on operational mission requirements when identifying the spaces needed at DLIFLC, instead of also considering historical fill rates. If responsible personnel used historical fill rates, along with operational mission requirements, and attempted to achieve a fill rate of 90 percent, we estimate the Army could save an average of about $24.7 million annually.” (page 2 of 44)
- “We found that the Army also needed to improve its management of [foreign language proficiency bonus] FLPB pay. Our statistical analysis of payments for May 2009 showed that the Army made overpayments of about $1.3 million to unqualified Soldiers and underpayments of about $270,000 to qualified Soldiers. The pay errors occurred primarily because the Army didn’t have a centralized process to monitor and track eligible Soldiers by position, foreign language skill, pay rate, and category. Developing a centralized monitoring process would significantly improve the accuracy of FLPB pay. We estimated the Army could reduce overpayments by about $12.6 million annually.” (page 2 of 44)
- “[R]ecruits’ successful completion of the [Defense Language Aptitude Battery] DLAB test doesn’t predict success or translate to trained and proficient linguists.” (page 8 of 44)
- “We also calculated the graduation rates for the U.S. Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy. We found that in FY 09 an average of only 61 percent of Service members met minimum proficiency scores after completing formal language training.” (page 8 of 44)
- “While DOD requires the Army to use the DLAB, we believe that the graduation trend depicted above clearly shows that the test doesn’t provide an accurate assessment of an individual’s aptitude for learning a foreign language.” (page 8 of 44)
- “[T]he Army didn’t use about 25 percent of the spaces that it paid for in FY 08 and FY 09. Further, in FY 08 the Army had a fill rate significantly lower than two other Services [the Air Force and the Marines].” (page 10 of 44)
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