Defense Contract Audit Agency Reviews

**NOTE: These complaints come from an auditor who has worked for the agency for less than 4 years. These cons might not be a concern if you are lucky enough to get a good supervisor, but from my experience there are maybe 20% supervisors who deserve their position** * Training doesn't translate to the field, Audit seniors and supervisors tell you to do things different than agency quality. When quality comes in to correct working papers often times Supervisors don't admit to improper guidance. * Supervisors play games with a lot of the benefits. The HR people might say that teleworking shouldn't be a problem but then it feels like you have to "prove yourself" to your supervisor before they will allow you to do so. Furthermore, auditors are reprimanded if they're in a few minutes after 9:00 AM or if they take a long/late lunch. I see supervisors and managers do all of these things routinely. The hypocrisy is abundant. * Supervisory guidance is non-existent and the review process is severely under-documented and never done timely. * Supervisory answers to my questions felt like they were just blowing me off with a generic response so that they could tend to something more important. So much of my guidance was "use auditor judgment" when I'm a new hire. With respect to contract audit my judgment needs to be developed. * I was working on material for 6+ months before any of it was actually reviewed. While my supervisor told Quality that she was looking over my work, she was looking over virtually nothing. My first 3 months on the job the supervisor had her door closed almost every day to the point that I wasn't even sure she was there most days. I routinely get this line that it "takes 3 years to learn what you are doing" but I'm convinced it's this way because supervisors aren't committed to their employees. * It is commendable to try and get the most out of every employee, but that's a problem with an agency that has so many GS12s who are content with their position and generally lazy or unqualified. It gets to the point where new hires are doing all the work and usually getting paid much less than their peers because of the GS schedule. * The entire job hinges on communication with the Defense Contract Management Agency. They are the client for our audit reports. Unfortunately DCMA and DCAA are always at odds. They both believe the other is incompetent and it feels like a lot of our reports aren't even useful to DCMA. * There is a completely artificial deadline placed on reports being completed by government fiscal year end. This number often times matters very little at all but for political reasons. I believe the agency wants to say they questioned $XXX amount in the fiscal year to validate their existence. The issue is this artificial due date results in some really bad work being pushed through. What happens if we find problems last second? Do we extend the due date? No. We just work overtime to polish poor work, explain away problems, or question costs hastily in a way that won't be sustained.

Congress *The House Congress ("Freedom Caucus") is terrible and filled with self-serving morons who do not learn or understand the policy for which they are responsible. This has resulted not only it terribly executed furloughs (in some cases where half and office works and the other doesn't), but also preventing auditing of the non-DoD portion of contractors. *Management, especially upper Management, and Policy are frenetic. DCAA has drastic swings between hyper-excessive testing and borderline scope limiting due dates. This can be overcome by relying on source regulatory guidance and the actual auditing and attest standards. Also, Management does a poor job of allocating resources to pay performance related rewards and underestimates the significance/importance of these rewards. *Adequately Addressing Complication Factor - sometimes new employees start in locations, such as Resident Offices, that are very complex and difficult to grasp the "big picture." This can result in a lot of wasted effort and frustration for these employees and the employees trying to help these employees. Complication also makes the GAGAS standard of allowing an outside professional auditor to review and follow work-papers a challenge, too. Outside reviewers frequently fail to fully understand the complex issues. *The Working-retired and Permanently-disengaged: There are many individuals who for varied reasons simply hate working at DCAA but refuse to leave. Whether it was a bad performance review, a toxic manager, a rescinded report, getting sandbagged, or just have terrible attitudes and work ethic, these folks lack the courage to leave the Government and hold out for "better Government jobs" and either do not contribute or contribute just enough to not be fired but create toxic work environments. It can be tough being squeezed between these individuals and an antsy management. This is reflected in some other posts like Macbeth down there, to which my response would be, "nothing in his DCAA career became him quite like the leaving it" Get your masters/CPA, learn how procurement works and take a high paying job elsewhere. We may audit rocket science, but do not perform it.