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The Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness partially agreed with the recommendations in the report. The Under Secretary stated the DoD will direct the Services to use existing standardized aggregated data elements from the Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) for reporting in DoD-wide analyses of military justice disparities instead of individual Service data elements. The Under Secretary also agreed to establish a process that requires consistent use of demographic categories in Service personnel and military justice system databases across all Services. Finally, the Under Secretary agreed that a standardized data repository for analyses is necessary, but did not agree that a single military justice system case management database is necessary. Rather, the Department will create a single centralized Office of the Secretary of Defense-managed system to extract data.

We disagree that requiring the Services to use DMDC standardized race/ethnicity data elements for reporting requirements will assist in reporting because the data elements do not align with the military justice system data requirements. We will close the recommendations when we receive documentation illustrating that the DoD has developed consistent data elements for reporting and that demonstrates the single centralized Office of the Secretary of Defense-managed system can extract data and documents for analytical purposes.

Please see the Recommendations Table on the next page for the status of recommendations. ii │ DODIG-2023-083 (Project No. D2022-DEV0PF-0130.000)