A chapter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report discusses the Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) Mobile Enforcement Team Program. GAO found that since the program was established in 1995, DEA has enhanced its management of the program and provided for greater headquarters oversight and monitoring. In implementing the program and carrying out deployments, the field division METs generally complied with some of the pertinent requirements and guidelines that GAO reviewed. However, some DEA headquarters files did not contain adequate documentation, GAO could not determine whether the METs consistently and adequately assessed the requesting local law enforcement agencies' abilities to address, on their own, the drug and related violence problems for which DEA's program assistance was requested. DEA expects the program to focus on specific, targeted gangs in the areas in which the METs are deployed and that deployments will generally continue until the targeted individuals are arrested and the targeted drug gangs have been disrupted or dismantled. Consistent with the nature and objectives of the program, investigators focused primarily on street-level drug dealers and were mostly local and regional in scope. DEA collects data on various performance measures to assess the results of …

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "This report describes the financial and management impact of increasing physician reimbursement rates in TRICARE -- the military's managed health care program. GAO found that changing the TRICARE reimbursement rate nationally to the 70th percentile of billed charges would be costly, inflationary, and largely unnecessary. Such an increase could cost the Defense Department (DOD) and its beneficiaries an additional $604 million annually with DOD paying most of this. In addition, an across-the-board increase is unnecessary because the vast majority of military beneficiaries are getting the care they need from military and civilian doctors who accept TRICARE's reimbursement rates. Nevertheless, access is impaired in some remote and rural areas. DOD's use of its existing authority to increase reimbursement rates in one of those areas--rural Alaska--has not encouraged civilian physicians to treat TRICARE beneficiaries."