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Every year, The American Society of Military Comptrollers (ASMC) recognizes the accomplishments of its chapters, membership, and the defense financial management community through its awards program. This program includes a variety of individual and team achievement awards, and this year Chelsea Holz, an amazing accountant from Defense Finance and Accounting Service Rome won the individual Accounting Achievement Award.
Chelsea won for her work spearheading the initiative to transition the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) fund balance with treasury (FBwT) data from the Department 97 Reconciliation and Reporting tool (DRRT) to the Advanced Analytics (ADVANA) to enable improved reconciliations. The result of this work was increasing the FBwT match rate to more than 95 percent. In under 90 days, Chelsea worked to collaborate with the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and various DFAS Project Management Offices (PMOs) to make this conversion a reality.
The project began because Fiscal Year (FY) 19 Implementation of Sub-Allocation Holder Identification (SAHI) guidance for USSOCOM negatively impacted TI 97 FBwT Tier 3 reconciliation. The current logic in DRRT did not differentiate between funding and execution transactions, which compromised the data integrity of the output. The data problem had to be resolved within a six month period to mitigate risk to both audit and customer financial statements.
When presented with this problem, Chelsea's true leadership skills shined through as she quickly initiated working groups with open collaboration that led to significant findings. Upon receiving the initial reconciliation output from OSD, she immediately identified duplicate treasury files that were causing false positive variances. She advised OSD of these erroneous files and explained how their impact resulted in a near 30 percent reduction in line count savings. Because of this finding, logic has now been added to isolate these lines removing them from the total population.
Her action simplified the FBwT team's ability to identify true variances and has saved numerous man-hours as preparation of auditable documentation to clear these lines is now no longer required. Chelsea utilized her knowledge of DFAS and her network of contacts to find critical information quickly, leading to a consistent increase in overall match rates. Chelsea's efforts have led to an overall FBwT match rate increase from 78.6 percent to 95.3 percent in FY19, with increases realized consecutively month to month. These match rate increases provide our customers with cleaner, auditable financial statements, in line with the agency goal of audit steadiness.
Congratulations to Chelsea, her outstanding contribution continues a deep and rich history of the agency's good work. She has demonstrated the high caliber, strong commitment, and creativity needed to continue DFAS' legacy as a recognized leader in the financial management community.
| Date Taken: | 05.27.2020 |
| Date Posted: | 12.31.2020 10:15 |
| Story ID: | 386216 |
| Location: | CLEVELAND, OHIO, US |
| Web Views: | 44 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Holz recognized by ASMC, by Anthony Hardman, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
