http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/140078146

Review of the President's fiscal year 2009 budget request for the Defense Health Program's Private Sector Care Budget Activity Group

The Conference Report accompanying the Fiscal Year 2008 Department of Defense Appropriations bill directed us to review the President's fiscal year 2009 budget request for the Defense Health Program's Private Sector Care BAG. To do this, we reviewed (1) DOD's justification for the request for the Private Sector Care BAG, including the underlying estimates and the extent to which DOD considered historical information; and (2) changes between this request and the request for fiscal year 2008 and factors causing these changes. To conduct our work, we analyzed the methodologies that DOD used to develop the budget requests for the Private Sector Care BAG in fiscal years 2008 and 2009. We also interviewed officials and analyzed documents from DOD's Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) and TRICARE Management Activity, which were the offices responsible for developing budget requests for the Private Sector Care BAG. We also relied on prior GAO work, particularly past work in which we analyzed DOD's projected savings from planned increases in beneficiary cost sharing. In addition, we reviewed budget and obligation data related to the Defense Health Program but we did not validate these data. We have raised concerns about the quality of DOD's financial data in previous reports. However, we determined that these data were sufficiently reliable to understand DOD's budget formulation process and the underlying assumptions used to develop the President's budget request.

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