The Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) initiative will reach a major milestone on September 30, 2017. The entire Defense community needs to understand that as we begin Fiscal Year 2018 on October 1st — the FIAR Directive dictates that all accountable assets be audit ready.
The US Congress is holding the DoD accountable to achieve and sustain full audit readiness of DoD property, plant, equipment, operating materiel and supplies. It puts the highest priority on accountability for all qualifying asset information and to be able to verify the existence and completeness of that inventory. This department-wide endeavor requires military contractors and program managers to track and report all DoD property by this date.
This table represents the official FIAR strategy and deadlines as provided by DoD Comptroller Office. As illustrated above, the deadline for asset Existence and Completeness audit readiness is September 30, 2017. http://comptroller.defense.gov/fiar/fiarguidance.aspx
The branches of the US Military and contractors that support them have all made significant strides towards the FIAR initiative since its inception — but there is still a long way to go. The process of capturing and registering data for approximately 150 million assets, whether they are legacy items, Government Furnished Property or newly acquired assets, is a daunting task.
Fortunately, the Department has embraced the asset identification industry best practices for quickly and cost-effectively identifying, marking and tracking critical assets. The DoD refers to this practice as the Item Unique Identification (or IUID). And they have adopted a number of policies to streamline and simplify this process, most notably the IUID Policy. The DoD has also put into place the WAWF e-commerce suite which includes iRAPT and the IUID Registry as the gateway to reporting all military assets.
With these government systems and policies in place it comes down to the enormously important process of identifying, marking and registering these unique assets. If you are a defense contractor you need to make sure that your organization is executing this process flawlessly and that you are prepared for the inevitable DCMA Audit.
To learn more about the FIAR Directorate and the upcoming deadlines in the end of September watch this short segment from our A2B Tracking Webinar Series.
For the really deep dive and to make sure that your organization is audit-ready and fully compliant to the FIAR regulations download our recent FIAR whitepaper here.
