Book Description

The Department of Energy's (DOE's) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore) is a premier research and development institution for science and technology supporting the core mission of national security. According to Livermore, as of November 2008 the Laboratory managed 64,933 items of Government personal property valued at about $1 billion. At the beginning of Fiscal Year 2008, Livermore reported 249 DOE property items valued at about $1.3 million that were missing, unaccounted for, or stolen during Fiscal Year 2007. Livermore centrally tracks property utilizing the Sunflower Assets system (Sunflower), which reflects the cradle to grave history of each property item. Changes in the custodianship and/or location of a property item must be timely reported by the custodian to the respective property center representative for updating in Sunflower. In Fiscal Year 2008, over 2,000 individuals were terminated as a result of workforce reduction at Livermore, of which about 750 received a final notification of termination on the same day that they were required to depart the facility. All of these terminations potentially necessitated updates to the property database, but the involuntary terminations had the potential to pose particular challenges because of the immediacy of individuals departures. The objective of our inspection was to evaluate the adequacy of Livermore's internal controls over Government property. Based upon the results of our preliminary field work, we particularly focused on personal property assigned to terminated individuals and stolen laptop computers. We concluded that Livermore's internal controls over property could be improved, which could help to reduce the number of missing, unaccounted for, or stolen property items. Specifically, we found that: (1) The location and/or custodian of approximately 18 percent of the property items in our sample, which was drawn from the property assigned to individuals terminated on short notice in 2008, was inaccurately reflected in Sunflower. The data in this system is relied upon for tracking purposes, so inaccurate entries could increase the probability of property not being located during inventories and, thus, being reported as 'lost' or 'missing'. We believe that providing formal training to property custodians, which was not being done at the time of our inspection, could help improve this situation. (2) Some property custodians were not adequately protecting their Government laptop computers when taking them offsite, and they were not held accountable for the subsequent theft of the laptops. We made several recommendations to management intended to improve property controls at Livermore.