OGDEN, Utah — A Department of Defense audit found that 71 ballistic missile motors worth $53 million that were stored at Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah were inaccurately designated as not working.

The Standard-Examiner reports that spokeswoman Leah Bryant said “training issues” at some Air Force units resulted in items being listed inaccurately as “unserviceable but repairable” instead of being listed correctly as “serviceable.”

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Bryant is chief spokeswoman for the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. The center serves as headquarters for the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems Directorate at Hill.

Pentagon Comptroller David Norquist, who spoke with reporters ahead of the official release of the audit report on Nov. 15, pointed to the situation at Hill as an example of how the audit could be “directly relevant to readiness.”

“If you were to look in the database, it said they were not in working condition,” Norquist explained. “When you go look at the service tags, they were in fact in working condition. So as a result of this, the Air Force was able to redirect those $53 million worth of uninstalled missile motors back into the system to be used in supporting the department's mission, whereas before if they were just relying on the report, they would have thought they were not serviceable and either needed to go to repair or wouldn't have used them.”

A redesigned process for checking the condition of equipment found that the missile motors' conditions were listed erroneously at Hill, according to the audit.

Bryant says corrective steps are being taken.

“For the people in the field to have an accurate understanding of their inventory … this is a direct benefit to readiness, this is something that will be a priority in the very near term,” Norquist said, noting those could represent quick, easy wins. “The connection between the audit and not just business reform but readiness is one of the things that came out of this that we’re excited about.”

That example from Hill stands out, but classification errors in databases also applied to physical property, such as at an Army base where buildings were listed as usable in the national database but in the field were clearly broken down beyond repair. Having that information at hand allows the department to make smarter decisions about investing resources.

And fundamentally, now that problems have been identified, the department knows what to go after as the next year of auditing kicks off. As a bonus, the savings from the problems found here will help offset the $972 million cost of doing the audit in the first place, Norquist said.

Defense News reporter Aaron Mehta contributed to this report.

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