Executive
Waste of the Day: With $832 Billion Budget, Pentagon Fails Sixth Consecutive Audit
The Pentagon, with a budget of $832 billion, once again failed an audit, the sixth such failure in as many years.
The Department of Defense has a $832 billion annual budget but it hasn’t passed a financial audit for six years in a row, Reason Magazine reported.
DOD Office of the Inspector General and independent accounting firms look through the department’s finances, subdividing it into 29 components. Of those 29 components, only seven passed inspection with a “clean” audit, Reason reported.
Three components have not had inspections completed, while the Medicare-Eligible Retiree Health Care Fund received a “qualified opinion,” wherein “auditors concluded there were misstatements or potentially undetected misstatements that were material but not pervasive to the financial statements.”
The other 18 failed, including the National Security Agency and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
This overwhelming failure was the same as last year’s audit and similar to those since December 2017, when the DOD announced it would audit its own finances.
Before then, there was “more than two decades of stonewalling,” as Reason described it. The Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 required federal agencies to prepare financial reports annually but the DOD simply didn’t.
So Congress put a provision in the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act that gave the agency seven years to prepare for an audit. As Sen. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) put it, “The Pentagon was given an extra seven years to clean up the books and get ready.”
That first audit failed, with only five out of 21 components passing inspection, and the agency has been failing its audits since.
For a department that holds $3.8 trillion in assets and $4 trillion in liabilities, this is a frightening state of affairs.
The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.
Adam Andrzejewski (say: Angie-eff-ski) was the CEO/founder of OpenTheBooks.com. Before dedicating his life to public service, Adam co-founded HomePages Directories, a $20 million publishing company (1997-2007). His works have been featured on the BBC, Good Morning America, ABC World News Tonight, C-SPAN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, FOX News, CNN, National Public Radio (NPR), Forbes, Newsweek, and many other national media.
Today, OpenTheBooks.com is the largest private repository of U.S. public-sector spending. Mission: post "every dime, online, in real time." In 2022, OpenTheBooks.com captured nearly all public expenditures in the country, including nearly all disclosed federal government spending; 50 of 50 state checkbooks; and 25 million public employee salary and pension records from 50,000 public bodies across America.
The group's aggressive transparency and forensic auditing of government spending has led to the assembly of grand juries, indictments, and successful prosecutions; congressional briefings, hearings, and subpoenas; Government Accountability Office (GAO) audits; Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports; federal legislation; and much more.
Our Honorary Chairman - In Memoriam is U.S. Senator Tom Coburn, MD.
Andrzejewski's federal oversight work was included in the President's Budget To Congress FY2021. The budget cited his organization by name, bullet-pointed their findings, and footnoted/hyperlinked to their report.
Posted on YouTube, Andrzejewski's presentation, The Depth of the Swamp, at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar 2020 in Naples, Florida received 3.8 million views.
Andrzejewski has spoken at the Columbia School of Journalism, Harvard Law School and the law schools at Georgetown and George Washington regarding big data journalism. As a senior policy contributor at Forbes, Adam had nearly 20 million pageviews on 206 published investigations. In 2022, investigative fact-finding on Dr. Fauci's finances led to his cancellation at Forbes.
In 2022, Andrzejewski did 473 live television and radio interviews across broadcast, major cable platforms, and radio shows. Andrzejewski is the author of The Waste of the Day column at Real Clear Policy. The column is syndicated by Sinclair Broadcast Group, owners of nearly 200 ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX affiliates across USA.
Andrzejewski passed away in his sleep at his home in in Hinsdale, Illinois, on August 18, 2024. He is survived by his wife Kerry and three daughters. He also served as a lector at St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church and finished the Chicago Marathon eight times (PR 3:58.49 in 2022).
Waste of the Day articles published after August 18, 2024 are considered posthumous publications.
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