nother year, another failed audit for Uncle Sam. Funny, you haven’t heard any of the presidential candidates talk about it, either.
Since 1997, the Government Accountability Office has audited the federal government. Or tried to, anyway. It never works out: Try as the auditors might to come up with an opinion on the government’s consolidated financial statements, the numbers are just too murky.
This year, there were “issues with the Department of Defense’s finances, the government’s inability to account for some transactions and the government’s ineffective report-preparing process,” as described by the Beltway-insider publication The Hill.
“In simple terms, more than a third of your government is a black hole,” sum up Pam and Russ Martens at their Wall Street on Parade website.
The GAO said it was unable to effectively audit “34% of the federal government’s reported assets as of Sept. 30, 2015, and approximately 19% of the federal government’s reported net cost for fiscal year 2015.”
In fact, the number of agencies whose bookkeeping is backsliding is growing. Nearly every Cabinet department got a “clean” opinion in 2014… but in 2015, Defense, Agriculture and Housing and Urban Development couldn’t pass muster.
The Pentagon is a special case. It’s been a bookkeeping disaster for at least 20 years.
Back in 1990, Congress passed a law requiring all federal agencies to be audited annually; the Pentagon was required to comply by 1996. It blew the deadline and has remained in violation ever since.
Said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld the day before the Sept. 11 attacks, “According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” By the end of 2013, that number had swelled to $8.5 trillion, dating back to the 1996 deadline.
In 2009, Congress passed yet another law setting a new deadline for the Pentagon to be audit-ready — 2017. Next year. But there were no “or else” consequences attached to this deadline.
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