Rules of Engagement? Sheesh, Give Me a Break

DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency) has come out with its "rules of engagement". Huh? Is DCAA a military or para-military organization where it must define the circumstances, conditions, degree, and manner in which provocative force must be employed? That's scary. Or perhaps, its fashioning itself after the (now cancelled) CBS sitcom by the same name.

Show Me Your History

A couple of researchers from a local university formed a company last month after getting a $350 thousand cost-reimbursable SBIR (small-business innovative research) contract. They submitted some provisional billing rates based on forecasted costs as they had no historical data. DCAA comes in to review the rates, asked them to fill out this ICQ (Internal Control Questionnaire) since they were a new company and and then asked to see the actual rates for the last two years. Here's Your Sign.

Don't Mess With the Auditors

The auditors finally arrived this morning about 10:30. Yesterday they gave us a list of 22 transactions they wanted to review and asked us to pull the purchase order, the invoice, and the cancelled check for each and have it ready for them bright and early today. Yeah right. Iron Mountain came by and picked up all that stuff for archiving years ago. It's probably in a warehouse somewhere in Moses Lake. It'll take at least a week to retrieve it (not to mention that we're going to have to pay Iron Mountain a retrieval fee). The auditors seemed upset when we didn't have it ready for them, saying that we were impeding their audit, threatening to elevate this as an access to records issue, telling us that we could be subpoenaed. In fact, they sounded something like this: