Accounting Treatment of Officer and Office Salaries
Q. The pricing analyst at DCMA has asked for our Officers Salaries and Office Salaries accounts, both of which are G&A and are requesting payroll reports for the indirect labor and “an exact breakdown of the responsibilities of this group and the amount of time spent on each type of task.” I am thinking about saying the nature of G&A jobs is dynamic and the activities vary from day to day, and of course we do not record time to break out the different activities since they are all within the G&A.
A. Yes, it is unusual to request this information for 100% G&A labor. Perhaps they are looking for instances of unallowable activities (e.g. M&A work, public relations or advertising costs, trade shows) or they want to see whether some of their time should be charged either direct or to overhead rather than G&A. These days DCMA “price analysts” are auditing costs that used to be handled by DCAA and we find them becoming quite “creative” – e.g. looking to ding you because your officers don’t complete timecards, which would be inappropriate. Assuming you can’t identify G&A tasks worked and/or they don’t complete timecards I would say your response is fine.
