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erans Access, Choice and Accountability Act of 2014. But Congress has yet to act on a num- ber of pending initiatives, including S. 2921, the Veterans First Act, which was approved by the SVAC but hasn’t been brought before the full Senate. “We want to see the exhaustive work of the commission as well as critical leg- islation proposed by the Congress and the administration enacted this year,” Campos told legislators. All witnesses agreed action is needed
to provide the VA with the authority and funding to continue its work. There also was agreement on continuing the Choice Program, fixing the broken veterans’ claims appeals system, and the need for stable VA leadership to change the cul- ture within the VA. “VA cannot accomplish the ongoing
transformation envisioned by MyVA and the commission without critical legisla- tive changes and funding,” said Secretary McDonald. “Congress must act or veter- ans will suffer.”
Committee Chair Sen. Johnny Isakson
(R-Ga.) agreed with the importance of pass- ing the pending legislation, telling witness- es: “We all need to be working together to fix appeals and other issues, even if we can only get to 80-percent agreement.”
Commissary Savings —
O
more efficient and reduce its dependence on taxpayer subsidies. Congress and the Pentagon have
agreed maintaining patron savings at cur- rent levels is the first priority. Any efforts to chase efficiency must not diminish patrons’ savings. As such, that benchmark of current savings must be established to measure the impact of future changes. Current savings relative to commer-
cial grocery stores — long reported by commissary officials as 30 percent — are calculated as a worldwide average. Last year, a report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimated it to be 16-21 percent in CONUS locations. This discrepancy — largely due to a much more limited market basket of goods used by the BCG — raised MOAA’s concern about the sensitivity of such calculations to the size and variety of the market basket sample. This is important because the measure of merit in pursuing commissary opera- tion changes is whether they preserve the same level of patron savings. How you measure savings is a key issue. DoD announced it will continue using the same current worldwide savings benchmark and also introduce a new sys- tem to measure locality-based savings for
Recalculating New benchmarks are in the works.
ver the past year, MOAA has been vigilantly monitoring ongoing DoD and congressional
efforts to make the commissary system
various U.S. regions. Worldwide: For years, the Defense Com- missary Agency’s (DeCA’s) savings calcu- lation has been done annually, comparing DeCA’s prices (cost + 5 percent surcharge) for 38,000 products against a massive database of national average prices (in- cluding sales tax) in commercial grocery stores for those same products. This will
continue but will be done monthly. Regional: Commissaries will be di- vided into seven regions for comparison against popular regional retailers. DoD will begin market analysis to identify the three greatest competitors in the area of each commissary, based on patron
*on the web: Inim voluptat elit utpating ex etuerci eu feum eum aliquating ese feugait NOVEMBER 2016 MILITARY OFFICER 31
Take Action Visit
http://capwiz.com/ moaa/home to send your legislators a MOAA- suggested message on key issues affecting the military community.
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