“These restrictions,” Campbell wrote, “could seriously hamper the General Accounting office in performing its statutory responsibility and will impede the performance of our work.”
He pointed out to McElroy that his GAO auditors could not do their job in the face of directives that prohibited them from examining the Inspector General reports, and allowed them only a summary of reports as approved by the Secretaries of the various armed services.
In a letter to Chairman Hebert, Campbell made his complaint more specific:
“Any information or factual data directly bearing on a program of activity subject to audit by the General Accounting Office should not be withheld or subjected to procedures designed to screen official documents, papers, or records, by the authority or activity being audited.”
Later, in a letter to the Moss subcommittee on Government Information, the Comptroller General stated that he was seeking to make a study of the activity of the Inspector General of the Air Force to determine how effective the internal investigations had been.
He stated that to conduct such an investigation, the GAO inspection must include:
1 A survey of the Air Force procurement methods (advertising versus negotiation).
2 A survey of procurement quantitative and qualitative program changes.
3 A survey of contract cost overruns.
“It is essential that such reports be made available to the General Accounting Office in order that we can evaluate the effectiveness of the department’s system of internal control and to preclude unwarranted and unnecessary duplication of effort in the internal audit and the independent reviews made by this office,” Campbell wrote.