Congressional investigators found some big goofs by three bases fighting for survival against Hill Air Force Base.

Take, for example, a problem that the U.S. General Accounting Office found at the Oklahoma City Air Logistics Center. It, like Hill, is one of five centers that oversee Air Force purchasing, repairs and maintenance.Auditors found Oklahoma City had received an order for six doors to B-1B bombers from a customer base. But it "incorrectly recorded (the number) in the wholesale supply system as 9,999 rather than the six actually needed," the GAO said.

Not surprisingly, Oklahoma City didn't have that many doors on hand.

But over the next year, it managed to send 60 doors to the base, "and the remaining quantity of 9,939 doors was shown as a back order" - meaning the center was trying to obtain them through purchase orders or salvage operations, the GAO said.

That was an example of how "the Air Force continues to have significant amounts of invalid back orders in the supply systems because they are not detected and canceled," the GAO said.

The GAO said in 1989 that the same thing occurred, and it decided to check whether the problems had been corrected.

It made a check of back orders at three of the Air Force's five logistics centers - Oklahoma City, San Antonio and Warner-Robins - and 14 of their customer bases.

The other two logistics centers - Hill and Sacramento - were not part of the study.

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The Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission has said it would like to close two of the five logistics centers during the 1995 round of base closures. Utah officials argue Hill is the most efficient and say all the Air Force centers are more efficient than their Army, Navy and Marine competitors.

The GAO sampled 1,823 back orders worth $406 million on file with the three logistics centers and customer bases, and found $209.3 million worth were invalid - and were then canceled.

San Antonio had $112.5 million worth of such problem orders, Oklahoma City had $41.1 million and Warner-Robbins had $1.2 million. The rest were scattered among the customer bases.

The GAO said the problems came because customer bases lacked guidance on how to verify back orders, the centers did not properly perform quarterly back-order reconciliation and the Air Force stopped automatically canceling back orders when customer bases failed to respond to quarterly reconiliation data requests.

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