The Defense Travel System is still plagued with problems, and Pentagon officials admit it will take at least three years before it is fully functional.
Among the troubles, according to Defense Department officials and congressional auditors:

— The system often lacks enough commercial data needed by travelers to make hotel and rental car arrangements, which prompts many to use a travel agent.

— Real-time assistance is not always available or responsive for people using the system or encountering complications during their trips.

— The system follows strict travel rules that require additional bureaucracy when flexibility is needed.

Pentagon officials admitted last week that Defense Department travelers who use the system are not big fans.

“We’re still midway toward our goal of satisfied users, and that’s the furthest part of our journey [ahead],” Michael Dominguez, principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, told the House Armed Services subcommittee on oversight and investigations.

He declined to offer details about how users rate the system or the exact methods used to measure user satisfaction.

Dominguez said the department will use customer satisfaction surveys to measure progress, but he declined to say when he expects the system to be considered “user-friendly.”

That goal will likely take years to achieve. The Pentagon plans to have all of the travel system’s functions online by the end of fiscal 2010. A year after that, the department hopes to shut down dozens of legacy travel systems that the Defense Travel System (DTS) was intended to replace.

DTS is in use at only 85 percent of the Defense Department’s 11,000 sites, Pentagon officials said. They had earlier planned to have the system in use at all the sites by last year.

User problems continue

A big complaint from users, according to Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., is difficulty in finding help at odd hours or when a traveler is on the road and encountering problems.

“It would be nice to have a 24-hour hot line,” Gingrey said. “But after hours, you can’t get through. … Users told us about being stuck in Turkey and trying to get a flight out.”

The Government Accountability Office also criticized the system for what it called “rigid rules” that created extra bureaucracy. For example, DTS requires managers to manually approve any difference between the travel authorization and the actual cost of the trip.

The size of the difference doesn’t matter: If a manager approves $500, and the actual cost is $495, that requires a manual approval.

“You [DoD] need to take a look at your processes and procedures and simplify those,” said McCoy Williams, GAO director of financial management and assurance.

Defense officials say they’ve turned the corner and DTS is making progress.

DTS has been plagued by problems for years. In 2006, GAO released a series of reports that questioned the economic benefits of the system.

Today, DTS, developed by Northrop Grumman Corp., is handling about 50 percent of temporary-duty travel, about $4.5 billion in annual costs. The rest of the department’s travel requirements, including permanent changes of station, will be added to the system over the next three years.

Questionable cost savings

The department says that once the system is fully implemented, it will save $56 million annually in administrative and overhead costs. But GAO says there is no solid case to support that estimate.

“The estimates used to generate these savings were unreliable,” GAO said in its report. “The assumption behind the personnel savings computation was that there would be … fewer staff needed. However, [the services] did not anticipate a reduction in the number of personnel … but rather shifting staff to other functions.”

GAO auditors also pointed out redundancies in the department’s travel program. Before DTS, the department had at least 31 different travel systems, and many of those are still being used today, alongside DTS.

“The department is spending funds to operate duplicative systems,” Williams said. “And DoD components are paying higher travel fees [by] processing travel manually, as opposed to processing [it] through DTS.”

Dominguez said the department hopes to have all of its legacy systems disconnected by 2011.

“We’re in this process of evaluating legacy systems to see what function they perform,” Dominguez said, “and what it would take to pull the plug on them as DTS functionality proceeds.”