Compliance Inspections -- Do they work?

[RiverAux]

Many of you have had experience in undergoing wing Compliance Inspections or the equivalent inspections performed on squadrons. 

1.  Do you think these inspections are useful in ensuring that the units (wing or squadron) are doing what they're supposed to be doing?

2.  If you underwent the inspection either as a staff officer or commander, were they useful to you in figuring out where you needed to beef up your program?  Or did they confirm what you pretty much knew already?

In my experience these inspections are mostly paperwork exercises and I think the past has shown that especially in the area of logistics, are obviously very necessary in ensuring that equipment is where it is supposed to be.  However, in all the other programs I'm not sure they're helpful either to the ones doing the inspections or the ones on the receiving end.

[CAPSGT]

I believe that they are well intended, but poorly executed.

I first when through this while serving as a Wing DA.  I first went through a SAV only 2 weeks after I had taken over.  It was helpful in that it showed me what I needed to fix, but at the same time some of the things we were gigged on were very subjective and we should not have had a finding.  When the CI came around, we had a CAP-USAF Financial Analyst doing the inspecting who really didn't know exactly what she was looking at.  The plus side was that overall it gave me plenty to do to get ready for the inspection.

I'm currently preparing for an upcoming SUI at the squadron level.  This time I'm working in ES.  The problem is that the SUI guide is not exactly written to match the current updates to technology and forms.  If the guides were written properly and the inspections properly followed up on, I would say that they would be much more effective.

Evaluated SARs are much the same.  You can have departments that are not even doing what they are supposed to be doing get terriffic ratings if the evaluator does not know what they are looking at.  At the same time, you can have an expert evaluating who is overly harsh because things are not done just the way they like.  I've seen this from both sides of the evaluation (once as a member of the eval team and many times from being on the mission staff). 

If nothing else, these inspections make folks get themselves in shape for the inspection in the hopes that they will at least maintain that baseline.  YMMV

[Eclipse]

The good - CI's and SUI's indicate where a unit's weaknesses are and what they are missing.

The bad - showing them that doesn't likely change their available resources, and unless it is something
which is absolutely required, the "fix" is likely to be a rubber stamp, or discontinuance of whatever program isn't working up to regs.