End users of the software have concerns about the project, said Lee Stone, vice president of legislative affairs for NASA's union, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers of the AFL-CIO and the Canadian Labour Congress. The organization has been critical of the IEMP and believes that the biggest problem is the way it imposes complex accounting processes, he said.

There are also various technical problems, including integration gaps between SAP and other applications, such as NASA's workforce management system. The SAP software can be hard to use, and it's not clear that it's boosting productivity, Stone said.

"It remains unlikely that NASA will achieve a clean audit again this year, despite the fact that SAP went live back in October of 2003," he claimed.

Patrick Ciganer, the program's executive officer, didn't deny the project's complexity and the technical and personnel-related challenges. "It's been very tough, because we were an early [federal] adopter and we've been under a lot of scrutiny by oversight organizations. There have been a lot of challenges," he said.

Ciganer said that the inspector general's criticisms were largely related to procurement and that those issues haven't affected the technology. He also said that since the core financials system went live in 2003, it has generally worked as anticipated.