In September 1993, the National Performance Review called for an overhaul of DOD’s temporary duty (TDY) travel system. In response, DOD created a task force to examine the department’s travel operations. The task force found that those operations were costly, inefficient, fragmented, and did not adequately support DOD’s mission travel needs. On December 13, 1995, the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology (AT&L) and the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller)/Chief Financial Officer issued a memorandum, “Reengineering Travel Initiative,” which established the PMO-DTS and tasked it with acquiring travel services that would be used DOD-wide. In a 1997 report to the Congress, the DOD Comptroller reported that the existing DOD TDY travel systems were never designed to be integrated. The report stated that because there was no centralized focus on the department’s travel practices, the travel policies were issued by different organizations and the process had become fragmented and “stovepiped.” The report further noted that there was no vehicle in the current structure to overcome these deficiencies as no single individual or organization within the department had specific responsibility for management control of DOD TDY travel. In 1998, the department initiated efforts to develop and implement DTS to provide the department with a single, integrated, end-to-end travel system. According to DTMO officials, the department projects that DTS will be deployed to all intended locations—about 9,800— during fiscal year 2009. In response to congressional concerns regarding the implementation and operation of DTS, the John Warner National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 directed that the department have an independent assessment of DTS to determine the most cost-effective method of meeting DOD’s travel requirements. The assessment, which was completed by the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) in March 2007, focused on three mandatory elements specified in the legislation. The first two pertained to the department’s travel reservation process and the third to the feasibility of making the DTS financial infrastructure mandatory for all DOD travel transactions and phasing out legacy travel systems. The IDA study found that the department’s mid-February 2007 updates to DTS effectively addressed the underlying issues and concerns raised by the study regarding continued use of DTS’s travel reservation process and recommended its continued use. Regarding the feasibility of making DTS mandatory for all DOD travel transactions, the study concluded that while the institute found that legacy systems are being used even when DTS could be used, there were situations—such as certain travel types (e.g., permanent change of station) that DTS cannot accommodate and sites where DTS has not yet been fielded—that must be addressed before the use of DTS can be made mandatory DOD-wide. As a result, the study recommended that DOD mandate the use of DTS for all travel that it is currently capable of supporting. Our January 2006 and September 2006 reports contained 14 recommendations aimed at improving DOD’s management oversight and implementation of DTS and related travel policies. DOD officials have indicated that the department has taken action to close all 14 of our recommendations. However, based upon our work to date to validate DOD’s actions, we consider 7 of the 14 recommendations as closed and the remaining 7 open. The 7 closed recommendations pertained to premium-class travel, unused airline tickets, use of restricted airfare, proper testing of system interfaces, and streamlining of certain travel processes, such as the process for approving travel voucher expenses. Our preliminary analysis of the 7 closed recommendations found that the actions taken by the department responded to the intent of our recommendations; however, we need to perform additional work to validate the department’s closed status regarding these recommendations. Of the 7 open recommendations, 3 related to the adequacy of DTS’s requirements management and system testing, 3 related to DTS underutilization, and 1 related to developing an approach that will permit the use of automated methods to reduce the need for hard copy receipts to substantiate travel expenses. Below are two examples of where DOD has acted upon our prior recommendations and two examples where the recommendations remain open. Premium-class travel. We reported in January 2006 that the commercial travel offices (CTO) were not adhering to the department’s policy restricting the use of premium-class travel and recommended that the department take action to ensure that CTOs do so. Because each premium-class ticket costs the government up to thousands of dollars more than a coach-class ticket, unauthorized premium-class travel can result in millions of dollars in unnecessary travel costs annually. Our preliminary work found that the department has made changes to DTS requiring approval of premium-class travel by the authorizing official prior to the issuance of the airline ticket to the traveler by the CTO. Additionally, in October 2007, DOD released a Web-based management tool, which captures premium-class travel approvals and provides monthly reports related to premium-class travel to DTMO. Further, according to DOD officials, the CTO contracts include a monthly reporting requirement regarding premium-class travel. The department’s actions are responsive to the intent of our recommendation. Unused airline tickets. We reported in January 2006 that DOD had not recovered millions of dollars in airline tickets that DOD travelers purchased but did not use. To address this issue, we recommended that the department consider the viability of using commercial databases to identify unused airline tickets, for which reimbursement should be obtained, and to help ensure that the actual travel taken was consistent with the information shown on the travel voucher. In its efforts to implement this recommendation, DTMO found that commercial sources could not readily identify unused airline tickets. In implementing this recommendation, DTMO officials acknowledged that the ongoing CTO initiative, which is scheduled for completion by June 2009, requires CTOs to identify and cancel an unused airline ticket 30 days after the planned trip date and then initiate the refund process. CTOs will be required to provide monthly unused airline ticket reports. DTMO officials stated that as the department negotiates new CTO contracts, this reporting requirement will be included in all new contracts. The department’s actions are responsive to the intent of our recommendation. Requirements management and system testing. Our January 2006 and September 2006 reports noted problems with DTS’s ability to properly display flight information and traced those problems to inadequate requirements management and system testing. Specifically, the system was not displaying all eligible flights that travelers could choose within their anticipated departure and arrival times due to inadequately defined requirements. Properly defined requirements are a key element in developing and implementing systems that meet their cost, schedule, and performance goals since requirements define the (1) functionality that is expected to be provided by the system and (2) quantitative measures by which to determine through testing whether that functionality is operating as expected. We recommended that DOD implement the processes necessary to provide reasonable assurance that requirements are properly documented and adequately tested and to simplify the display of airfares in DTS. To determine if the department acted on our three previous recommendations, we selected 90 requirements related to DTS’s display of flight information for detailed review and analysis of the testing performed. We also selected an additional 119 requirements that were covered by DOD’s testing process that was newly implemented in July 2007. Based upon our preliminary analysis and discussions with DTMO, PMO-DTS, and the prime contractor for the development and implementation of DTS, we found that while DTS’s requirements management and testing process has improved, problems still persist. The problems were generally related to missing documentation, the limited scope of requirements testing performed, or both. For example, one requirement indicated that DTS should not allow a traveler to select flight departure or arrival dates that were outside the established itinerary trip dates. Our review of DOD’s test of this requirement showed that only 3 of the 6 boundary conditions needed to fully test this requirement had been tested. Neither DOD nor its contractor could provide documentation supporting testing for the day after the traveler’s departure date, the day before the arrival date, and the day after the arrival date. Based on our analysis, this requirement was not adequately tested. Another requirement indicated that if the contract carrier for the specified General Services Administration (GSA) city pair is Southwest, then DTS shall identify the available flights based on Southwest’s published Y-class fares for the specified city pair. Our analysis found that the test documentation associated with this requirement only displayed the flights for GSA limited availability fares, which did not include the Southwest Y-class fares called for by the requirement. Therefore, this requirement was not adequately tested. Our review of the 119 requirements included in DOD’s new testing process disclosed that the process does not fully address the problems related to weak requirements management and system testing that we identified in our prior DTS reports. For example, we found that requirements were not adequately tested. The three recommendations we made in the area remain open. The department has provided additional documentation and we are in the process of analyzing the documentation to determine the extent to which the revised requirement management and testing processes have improved. DTS underutilization. Our January 2006 and September 2006 reports noted the challenge facing the department in attaining planned DTS utilization. More specifically, as discussed in our September 2006 report, we found that while the military services have issued various memorandums that mandate the use of DTS to the fullest extent possible at those sites where DTS has been deployed, sites were still using legacy travel systems to process TDY travel. Additionally, we found that the department did not have reasonable quantitative metrics to measure and reliably report on the extent to which DTS was actually being used. As of the issuance of our September 2006 report, DTS utilization rates reported by DOD were based on the DTS Voucher Analysis Model developed in calendar year 2003 using military service data, which were not verified or validated.