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AFMD-93-39R 1 (1992-11-12)

handle is hein.gao/gaobackee0001 and id is 1 raw text is: 1'tliSG GAOP U nited States GAO General Accounting Office Washington, D.C. 20548 Accounting and Financial Management Division 147986 November 12, 1992 Mr. Neil R. Ginnetti Acting Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management) Dear Mr. Ginnetti: The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 requires the Department of the Army to prepare financial statements for fiscal year 1992 and, as authorized by the Act, the General Accounting Office is performing an audit of the statements. As part of this audit, we have requested records which list and summarize individual disbursement transactions that accumulate in various general ledger balances and are reported in the Status of Approved Resources reports for the Missile Command and the Tank-Automotive Command. Army Materiel Command (AMC) officials have told us that these records are initially created in a machine readable format. However, according to these officials, these machine readable records are destroyed at least monthly with no archive copy (hard copy or machine readable) being retained. The Army's Records Disposition Standards (AR 25-400-2, Appendix B) prescribe the periods of time that the Army must retain its various records before destroying or otherwise disposing of them. We have found nothing in the standards authorizing AMC to destroy these records each month. The National Archives and Records Administration Act of 1984 (44 U.S.C. 3314) and its implementing regulations (36 C.F.R. Part 1228) prohibit federal agencies from destroying records in a manner inconsistent with the governmentwide General Records Schedules or approved agency records disposition programs. Without these records, we believe it would be virtually impossible to verify whether the individual budgetary and general ledger transactions are recorded in accordance with GAO/AFMD-93-39R Army Records Retention C, -~9(