Talk of stringent deadlines may have permeated the Defense Department’s past, but today’s DOD leaders recognize that consolidating finance systems to achieve a clean audit opinion is a multistep, long-term endeavor. It’s a brand new attitude that’s reflected in the department’s Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness Plan.

Issued in December, the purpose of the FIAR Plan is to guide the department in improving financial management by taking an incremental approach to examining its operations, diagnosing problems, planning corrective actions and preparing for an audit. But there’s no specter of a specific date.

The FIAR Plan also aims to ensure that plans for the deployment of modern financial and business systems are consistent with audit readiness priorities set by the FIAR Committee, as well as DOD’s Enterprise Transition Plan. Essentially, the FIAR Plan identifies progress to date and lays out quarterly milestones for achieving improved financial information on 71 percent of DOD’s assets and 80 percent of its liabilities. As a result, Thomas Modly, deputy undersecretary of Defense for financial management and the co-chief of the Business Transformation Agency, says the FIAR Plan “takes these systems’ milestones and integrates them with the business process re-engineering so that we can have a path toward understanding how long it’s going to take us to get to a clean opinion.”

Still, Modly knows that even the most carefully crafted plans can’t guarantee the meeting of milestones. “We know that we’re going to miss milestones, but just because we miss milestones, it doesn’t mean that we’re failing,” he says. “This is a long-term, incremental, improvement program. It’s going to take a very, very long time to get us completely transformed as an enterprise.”

In the meantime, DOD plans to focus its near-term objectives on some of the most significant balance sheet categories, including military equipment, military retiree eligible health care fund, real property, environmental liabilities and fund balance with Treasury.

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