GAO Report: Why It Takes State Dept. So Long to Process Applications

The GAO has analyzed State Department arms export case data for fiscal years 2003 through April 30, 2007 in order identify the reasons why it takes the State Department such a long time to process export applications. On November 30, 2007 the GAO produced a report of their findings and the need to address the inefficiencies and challenges in the arms export process.

There were three key trends that the GAO reported that seem to be holding up the DDTC in processing export licenses and other arms cases. One major issue is that the number of export cases processed has increased by 20 percent in the past 3 years. The second issue is that during this jump in cases came a median processing time that nearly doubled, because of this, the number of open arms export cases increased by 50 percent causing the third issue that the DDTC is faced with, numerous open cases. In September alone there were over 10,000 cases still open and the number is continuing to grow.

At the beginning of fiscal year 2007, the DDTC launched a new campaign to reduce the amount of open cases; they cancelled staff training, meetings, and industry outreach to ensure that cases would be closed. DDTC was able to cut the number of open cases by 40 percent in only 3 months, the problem is that this is not a long term solution and does not address how to fix the inefficiencies and problems they are faced with.

More information:

GAO Report (PDF)