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GAO Slams Delays in Arms Export Licensing Process

Posted by at 8:09 pm on January 3, 2008
Category: DDTC

GAOThe Government Accounting Office released today a report analyzing arms export licensing delays at the Department of State’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (“DDTC”). Not surprisingly, particularly to exporters experienced in DDTC’s licensing process, the report concludes that DDTC’s licensing procedures are plagued with inefficiencies and unnecessary delays and recommends that DDTC undertake a systemic review of licensing data to identify and eliminate these inefficiencies.

Some of the more interesting individual conclusions of the Report were the following:

  • While DDTC’s caseload increased 20 percent, from about 55,000 to 65,000 between fiscal years 2003 and 2006, median processing times almost doubled in the same time period, from 14 days to 26 days.
  • Although the electronic filing system D-Trade was supposed to increase efficiency of DDTC’s licensing procedures, it has not done so. The GAO’s analysis of processing times shows no significant difference between like types of cases submitted electronically versus paper submissions. For example, in fiscal year 2006, median processing time for permanent export cases submitted through D-Trade was 23 days versus 25 for paper submissions.
  • In fiscal year 2006, technical assistance agreements took a median of 94 days to process. (The Report does not mention the significantly greater delays in processing amendments to approved technical assistance agreements.)
  • The Report was critical of DDTC’s “winter offensive” of 2007. As part of the “winter offensive,” licensing officers stopped answering their phones and attending training classes in order to focus on processing license applications. Although the offensive did reduce the number of open cases, the Report noted that this was not a sustainable long-term solution and that the offensive had the “unanticipated effect of shifting the focus from the mission of protecting U.S. national security … to simply closing cases to reduce the queue of open cases.”
  • Although Congress in 2004 required that license applications for the United Kingdom and Australia be expedited, the processing times for export licenses to those destinations were not different from the times required to process licenses for exports to other allies.
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Copyright © 2008 Clif Burns. All Rights Reserved.
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3 Comments:

One more proof of how the political leadership of this administration is not responding to the needs of business exporters. The Bush Administration needs to have the leadership and the political courage to stand up to the anti-export isolationists in both their party and in the Democratic leadership, especially in the House, who never met an export restriction they didn’t like.

Comment by Mike Deal on January 4th, 2008 @ 11:38 am

The content of this report was expected and there is nothing new for DDTC. It will be a long time before we see substantial changes in both the CJ and licensing processes.

Comment by Ladyx on January 4th, 2008 @ 3:11 pm

The real problem isn’t the export regulations, it is a lack of staff to process the applications. And the staffing issue isn’t restricted to DDTC. All of the agencies receiving applications for review are short staffed when compared to the number of license applications being submitted for agency review. If Congress truely wanted to reduce application processing times, it would dramatically increase the number of LO and agency review positions.

Comment by Kndl on January 7th, 2008 @ 8:57 am