Are dining facilities wasting money because troops don’t eat there?

How often are service members passing up their meal entitlement and choosing to pay out of their own pockets and eat elsewhere, rather than eat at their dining facility?

For the most part, defense and service officials don’t know.

Which means they don’t have enough information to know how effective they are at their primary mission: feeding the troops, according to a report by government auditors.

With the exception of the Air Force, the military services aren’t tracking how much service members are using their meal entitlement benefit in their dining facilities, and other locations such as food trucks and kiosks where they can use the entitlement, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office. The services collect head count information, but don’t use it to track the use of the meal entitlements, although DoD guidance requires using head count data for periodic tests on the use of the entitlements. There’s also inconsistent and incomplete tracking of the taxpayer costs of these programs — including the cost per plate.