It seems like the kind of question that should have a well-documented answer: How much space does the Defense Department lease?

“The total amount is not entirely known, but it’s likely to be substantial,” Brian Lepore, director of defense capabilities and management issues at the Government Accountability Office, told Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Responding to a mandate from the House Armed Services Committee, the GAO examined the DoD’s Real Property Assets Database, the central inventory of space that the DoD leases. The GAO found a number of inaccurate and incomplete records.

In some cases, the DoD recorded the rent for a facility as being higher than the total combined cost of rent, utilities and parking. In other cases, the information was simply missing.

“There is some concern about the reliability of the data,” Lepore said.

He said that there is some good news: in a comparison between the fiscal 2011 and 2013 records, the GAO found that the accuracy of the records had improved by 5 percent.

But the implications of any inaccuracies extend beyond the DoD itself.

Lepore said that each military service and DoD organization maintains its own database of real property and submits that information to the DoD’s RAPD once a year. The RAPD in turn feeds into the Federal Real Property Profile, which collects this data from the entire government.

“Because DoD is such a large part — about half — of federal facilities, to the extent DoD’s data is inaccurate, the [FRPP] is also going to be inaccurate,” Lepore said.

GAO made a couple of recommendations to fix this situation.

First, DoD needs to figure out exactly how much it’s spending on rent, how much it’s spending on other costs like utilities and parking, and compile that information accurately.

Lepore said the DoD also needs to look more closely at spaces shared with other tenants. At one facility, Lepore said that two DoD organizations were sharing about 30,000 square feet of leased space. However, the RAPD documented each organization as occupying the entire space, so 60,000 square feet was listed in the records.

Lepore said some people may see this as “nitpicky, but it’s really important for effective financial management to have a good handle on what you are paying to run your operation, and in the absence of that, it’s hard to make really good effective decisions.”

For example, DOD has been asking for another round of Base Realignments and Closures for years. Lepore said that one of their main points is that about 20 percent of their current facilities are excess.

“Why would DoD continue to pay rent to commercial landlords for office space in particular, when so much capacity continues to exist?” Lepore asked. “When DoD actually had a BRAC process in 2005 … one of the things DoD wanted to do was vacate leased space.”

This goal existed for two reasons: first, government-owned space is much cheaper than leased space; second, many leased spaces are not up to anti-terrorism standards. In fact, there is a lack of data on security at most leased DoD facilities.

The Homeland Security Department’s Federal Protective Service assesses the security situations on leased DoD facilities outside of the Washington, D.C. area. But the DoD never requested the results of those assessments. Lepore said the agency has vowed to rectify this situation.

Lepore said the GAO checks up on agencies’ progress every six months whenever it makes a recommendation.

“We try to remind the agency: ‘You said you were going to do this, how much progress are you making?’ And we actually track that, so we have a pretty good idea when agencies actually take action,” Lepore said.

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