Pentagon seeks to speed up its investigations of official misconduct

When he was still the Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel expressed frustration that investigations into alleged misconduct by DoD officials always seemed to take a very, very long time, delaying his ability to make disciplinary decisions. In complicated cases, it can mean a four-star general accused of wrongdoing is assigned to low-responsibility staff job for more than a year while receiving full pay and benefits, with members of the press asking all the while, “What are you going to do with this guy?”

Hagel’s experiences weren’t just anecdotal, it turns out. According to a review of senior official investigations the Pentagon asked its inspector general to undertake, the average one takes 270 days. The DoD IG believes that average can be cut roughly in half by 2017 if the department follows the recommendations it delivered in a 131-page report marked “for official use only” in November and released publicly last week.

Part of the problem is funding: While the DoD IG and its military service counterparts are supposed to be independent, they’re not immune from budget cuts that have hit nearly every element of the department over the past several years, so the report recommends reversals to the staffing reductions the OIG offices are now facing.

But there are also plenty of things the department’s IG offices can do to smooth the process along by updating their business process, which vary widely from one military service to the next.

The review identified some fairly inefficient ways of tracking complaints, recording data and monitoring a case’s progress, including plenty of ad-hoc Excel spreadsheets. So among other recommendations, the authors recommend that all military IGs adopt the centralized case management system the DoD introduced for its own investigations last year, known as D-CATS.

The DoD IG also recommends more automation throughout the investigative process, more use of standardized forms, and better training for IGs’ various hotline staffs so that they’re better able to identify credible complaints and help push resources to high-priority cases, such as an official who’s awaiting confirmation to another post, or is about to retire from the military.

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