GAO reviewed the Marine Corps' procedures for planning and managing the phaseout of weapons systems and equipment, focusing on whether the Marine Corps Logistics Base (MCLB) in Albany, Georgia, was: (1) preparing adequate plans for items it was phasing out; (2) unnecessarily procuring or repairing phased-out items; and (3) coordinating phaseout plans with primary inventory control activities (PICA). GAO also examined the computer data logistics managers used to make procurement and repair decisions.

GAO found that: (1) the standard operating procedure (SOP) for preparing phaseout plans was inadequate; (2) logistics managers inadequately completed only a small percentage of the plans required for weapons systems and equipment; (3) MCLB was not providing PICA with sufficient information to compute requirements for some items being phased out, which could have caused PICA to buy unnecessary spare parts; (4) logistics managers had initiated unnecessary procurement and repair actions totalling about $1.8 million; (5) MCLB did not fully support 11 procurement or repair actions with current requirements data; and (6) computer data for some items contained errors. GAO also found that MCLB took corrective actions to: (1) revise SOP to require that phaseout plans also include asset-utilization plans; (2) assign responsibility for monitoring preparation of phaseout plans to two newly organized support branches; and (3) cancel the procurement and repair of items totalling about $1.7 million. GAO believes that: (1) MCLB actions to ensure the preparation and adequacy of phaseout plans and to manually review the accuracy of computer data should reduce unnecessary procurement and repair of phased-out items; (2) if computer errors are corrected in the new standard supply system, logistics managers should have more reliable information for phasing out weapon systems and equipment; and (3) if MCLB provides PICA with copies of phaseout plans, they will have more specific information on the level of support required for items phasing out of the inventory.