Defense Firm Chiefs Rap Auditing : Lockheed, Marietta Executives Say Too Many Involved
Two defense industry executives attacked government auditing programs Wednesday, despite one senator’s estimate that each auditor saves the government 10 times his or her salary, and criticized congressional efforts to limit Pentagon employees from moving into industry jobs.
Roy A. Anderson, chairman of Burbank-based Lockheed Corp., told a Senate subcommittee that “too many different audit agencies” are looking into the performance of the multibillion-dollar defense industry.
Echoing Anderson’s view, Thomas G. Pownall, chairman of Martin Marietta Corp., said that “it’s not uncommon for us to be visited by 15 to 20 auditors” each day. And, he added, the assistance of at least two employees is required for each auditor.
But Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) defended the system, in which audits and inspections may be carried out by the individual military service that is buying a weapon, by the Pentagon’s own department-wide auditors, by the Defense Department’s inspector general or by the General Accounting Office.
“For every auditor we add, we save 10 times his or her salary,” Levin declared at a special Senate Armed Services subcommittee hearing on defense procurement.
Addressing the subcommittee, Anderson complained that “heroes have been made of those who criticize our industry and the Department of Defense,” while those who make the defense establishment work are ignored.
“Today, our industry has come under increasingly vehement criticism for fraud, waste and abuse. Sure, industry has made some mistakes, but I believe that in relation to the magnitude and complexity of defense procurement, they have been isolated,” he said.
Anderson mentioned no specific projects in his remarks. But in the past year, public attention has been drawn to coffee makers installed in Lockheed C-5A cargo airplanes at a cost of more than $6,000 each and refrigerators placed on the submarine-hunting Orion plane at an even greater price.
The Lockheed chief said that in his company’s “Skunk Works,” where secret projects are developed, the manufacturer is able to produce weapons at about two-thirds the cost of non-classified projects because “there is considerably more mutual trust and joint problem-solving between the customer (the Pentagon) and us,” he said. “We both take on a high degree of responsibility for self-monitoring, and problems tend to be exposed earlier.”
Anderson was particularly critical of efforts to limit military officers and Pentagon civilians who have been auditors from accepting defense industry work when they leave government service.
But Levin retorted that without some type of controls, “there’s an appearance problem.” He said Pentagon representatives at defense plants “are supposed to be getting the best deal possible for us, and then we end up with a lot of our people working in the very company they’ve been negotiating with.”
