Financial Management: Customs Lacks Adequate Accountability Over Its Property and Weapons (Letter Report, 10/18/93, GAO/AIMD-94-1). As of September 1993, the U.S. Customs Service reported property valued at $712 million and held about 23,000 weapons. Despite recent substantive improvements in resolving long-standing problems in managing property, plant, and equipment, Customs' records were unreliable for managing and reporting on these assets. Customs (1) was unable to reconcile the accounting records and related detailed property subsidiary records to ensure that all property items were accounted for; (2) did not do physical inventories of nonequipment items and physical inventories of equipment were not effectively done at 17 of the 40 locations GAO had visited; and (3) was unable to support the values assigned to millions of dollars in property, mainly because appropriate procurement documents were unavailable and Customs used unrealistic estimates. In addition, Customs did not maintain adequate accountability and control over property and weapons, leaving these items vulnerable to theft. --------------------------- Indexing Terms ----------------------------- REPORTNUM: AIMD-94-1 TITLE: Financial Management: Customs Lacks Adequate Accountability Over Its Property and Weapons DATE: 10/18/93 SUBJECT: Financial management Internal controls Inventory control systems Federal property management Accountability Equipment inventories Federal supply systems Management information systems Financial records Federal agency accounting systems IDENTIFIER: Customs Service Weapons Inventory Control System Customs Service Property Information Management System ************************************************************************ We regret that the full text of this item is presently unavailable. See the GAO FAQ - Section 2.0 for printed copy ordering information. The FAQ is automatically retrieved with all WAIS search results or can be obtained by sending e-mail to: [email protected]