Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) issued their report on September 16, 2013 titled,

“Weaknesses in Asset Management Controls Leave Information Technology Assets Vulnerable to Loss” (Reference 2013-20-089)

 

Excerpt from the reports highlights section…

TIGTA also found that ineffective inventory controls created an environment where information technology assets are vulnerable to loss. TIGTA selected 146 information technology assets to physically verify and could not locate and verify or find proper supporting documentation for 34 information technology assets worth more than $948,000. In addition, IRS offices improperly completed the annual inventory reconciliation process.

The fact that 34 assets worth more than $948,000 are unaccounted for is bad, but this one paragraph is really communicating that the problem is much bigger than this!

Sampling is used to understand what is happening on a whole, so the results of TIGTA’s audit, that 34 items of the 146 sampled, means that we can expect that 23% of the assets in this program are unaccounted for. The first paragraph in this section gives us the overall scope.

The IRS Information Technology organization controls more than 306,000 information technology assets worth almost $720 million using the Knowledge, Incident/Problem, Service Asset Management (KISAM) system…

The real result of the audit is the extrapolation of the sample results to the total program. Here is the whole picture regarding unaccounted for IT equipment:

Sampling:

34 items worth $948,000 in sample were unaccounted for.

Program Total:

70,380 items worth $165,600,000 in program can be expected to be unaccounted for.

THAT is a lot of money!

Rick