Many DOD organizations, collectively known as the missing persons accounting community, have a role in accounting for the missing, as discussed below. The Under Secretary of Defense for Policy (USD (PACOM) are the two top-level Policy) and U.S. Pacific Commandleadership organizations in the accounting community. USD Policy is responsible for developing, coordinating, and overseeing the implementation of DOD policy to account for personnel unaccounted for as a result of hostile acts. The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Affairs, who reports to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, is responsible for, among other things, exercising policy, control, and oversight for the entire process of accounting for missing persons; monitoring and advocating for program funding requirements and resources for the mission; and leading and coordinating related communications efforts, such as the public outreach program. The Defense Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) is responsible for, among other things, overseeing archival research and standardizing procedures for methodology and prioritization; rendering final analytic judgments as to what constitutes fullest possible accounting for each case by identifying possibilities for future action, or determining when no further pursuit is possible; and defining, maintaining, and enumerating accounting lists. The DPMO Director is responsible for overseeing the execution of DPMO’s mission and duties. The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Affairs serves as the DPMO Director and reports to USD Policy in that capacity as well. PACOM exercises authority over the Joint Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Command (JPAC), which is responsible for conducting operations in support of achieving the missing persons accounting mission. In 2003 JPAC was established as a Joint Command by the merger of the Joint Task Force-Full Accounting with the Central Identification Laboratory – Hawaii in order to achieve unity of command, permanence of operational elements, and efficiency and effectiveness in the use of DOD’s resources, as well as to strengthen the command and control of military forces in achieving the fullest possible accounting. JPAC’s functions include analysis, archival research, investigations, recoveries, repatriations, identifications, and reporting. The Central Identification Laboratory is the laboratory component of JPAC. The military services have a role, with their service casualty offices serving as the primary liaison for families concerning missing persons recovery and accounting. Officials from these offices also assist families and help explain the methods used to account for their missing loved ones. Additional activities include gathering family deoxyribobucleic acid (DNA) reference samples, coordinating responses to family inquiries and concerns, and maintaining family contact information. The past conflict accounting section of the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory conducts DNA analyses of remains of missing persons from past military conflicts for JPAC and its laboratory component, the Central Identification Laboratory, and maintains the past conflict accounting family reference sample database, to include processing of all DNA references. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory is part of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, which reports to the Army Surgeon General. The Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory provides technical and analytical support to the accounting community, and is primarily tasked by JPAC’s Central Identification Laboratory to analyze and identify life science equipment-related artifacts that have been recovered and may potentially be related to missing persons cases. The Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory is part of the Air Force Materiel Command. In addition to these members of the missing persons accounting community, many other organizations play a role in the missing persons accounting process, including the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and the State Department. In addition, family and veterans organizations serve as constituency groups to the accounting community. The department’s response to the accounting-for goal established in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2010 brought into sharp relief longstanding disputes that have not been addressed by top- level leaders, and have been exacerbated by the accounting community’s fragmented organizational structure. As I will describe in more detail later in this statement, leadership from the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and Pacific Command have been unable to resolve disputes between community members in areas such as roles and responsibilities and developing a community-wide plan to meet the statutory accounting- for goal. Further, the accounting community is fragmented in that the community members belong to diverse parent organizations under several different chains of command. With accounting community organizations reporting under different lines of authority, no single entity has overarching responsibility for community-wide personnel and other resources. For example, although the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Affairs has statutory responsibility for policy, control, and oversight of the entire accounting process, JPAC—which performs investigations, recoveries, identifications, and other key functions—falls under the authority of PACOM, rather than reporting to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Prisoner of War/Missing Personnel Affairs. As a result, no single entity can implement or enforce decisions without obtaining widespread consensus. We have previously reported that having a single designated leader is often beneficial because it centralizes accountability for achieving outcomes and can accelerate decision-making. Concerns have arisen over the years, both within and outside of DOD, with regard to whether the current organizational structure of DOD’s missing persons accounting community enables the community to most effectively meet its mission. For example, a 2006 Institute for Defense Analyses study concluded that significant improvements could be made by increasing the lines of coordination in the accounting community and recommended that the community acknowledge DPMO as the leader in the accounting effort. The study also described some of the problems associated with the current organization; for example, that DPMO does not have tasking authority over the other organizations, and that while there are multiple lines of authority, no one organization has effective authority over execution of the entire mission. In our July 2013 report, we found that a majority of accounting community and DOD stakeholder organizations believe that an alternative organizational structure for the accounting community would be more effective. We administered a questionnaire asking representatives from each accounting community organization whether various options for reorganizing the missing persons accounting community could improve the community’s ability to meet its mission. One question asked respondents to rank five organizational options that would best enable the accounting community to meet its mission. We found that 12 of the 13 survey respondents who answered the question ranked an option with a more centralized chain of command as the most effective in enabling the accounting community to achieve its mission. Ten of these 12 respondents ranked the current organizational structure as the least effective or second least effective option for achieving the mission of the accounting community. Responses to our questionnaire also demonstrated a lack of confidence about the current organizational structure among many community and DOD stakeholder organizations. For example, 13 of the 14 survey respondents indicated that the current organizational structure did not enable or only somewhat enabled the community to develop the required capability and capacity to achieve the accounting-for goal. In addition, 12 respondents indicated that the current organizational structure did not enable or only somewhat enabled the community to collectively determine necessary resources. Furthermore, 9 respondents indicated that the current organizational structure did not at all enable the accounting community to define and agree on their respective roles and responsibilities. In contrast, not a single organization we surveyed ranked the current organizational structure as the most effective organizational option, and only three organizations—USD Policy, PACOM, and JPAC—ranked the current organizational structure as the second most effective organizational option. Illustrating a disconnect between leadership’s perspective and the rest of the community, only two organizations in our survey—USD Policy and PACOM, the two top-level leadership organizations in the accounting community—responded that the current structure greatly enables appropriate senior leadership involvement. USD Policy and PACOM stated that all of the organizational options, including the current organizational structure, offer access to DOD senior leadership. In addition, senior officials from these offices questioned whether the benefit of reorganization would result in real change and would be worth undergoing turmoil in the organization. While we recognize that a reorganization may pose challenges, such as creating the potential for short-term impacts on operations due to disruption, our findings in our July 2013 report show that the majority of accounting community members and other stakeholders lack confidence in the status quo, and we believe that the potential benefits of reorganizing and/or clarifying roles and responsibilities could outweigh those challenges. We recommended in our July 2013 report that the Secretary of Defense examine options for reorganizing the accounting community, to include considering organizational options that provide a more centralized chain of command over the accounting community’s mission. DOD concurred with this recommendation, stating that it will consider options for reorganizing the accounting community, ranging from maintaining the status quo to consolidation of DPMO and JPAC, as well as examining whether the Life Sciences Equipment Laboratory might also be included in this consolidation. DOD explained that the consolidated organization could be placed under the Office of the Secretary of Defense or a non- geographic combatant command to facilitate its worldwide mission and avoid competition for resources with a geographic combatant command’s war-fighting priorities. While DOD is working to revise its existing guidance and develop new guidance, the roles and responsibilities of the various members of the missing persons accounting community are not all clearly articulated in existing DOD directives or instructions. We have previously reported on the need for collaborating agencies to work together to define and agree on their roles and responsibilities. DOD has established several directives and instructions related to the missing persons accounting program. However, none of this guidance clearly delineates the specific roles and responsibilities of all the organizations comprising the missing persons accounting community in the four key areas that we examined for our July 2013 report: (1) equipment and artifact identification and analysis, (2) research and analysis, (3) investigations, and (4) family outreach and external communications.