After decades of waste, overpayments, trillions of missing or
improperly accounted for dollars, and most recently losing track
of 44,000 US soldiers, the Pentagon is about to undergo its first
audit in history conducted by 2,400 auditors from
independent public accounting firms to conduct reviews across the Army, Navy,
Air Force and more - followed by annual audits going forward.
The
announcement follows a May commitment by
Pentagon comptroller David Norquist, who previously served as the CFO at the
Department of Homeland Security when the agency performed its audit. "Starting an audit is a matter of driving change
inside a bureaucracy that may resist it," Norquist told
members of the Armed Services Committee at the time when pressed over whether
or not he could get the job done at the DHS.
According to
the DoD release:
The audit is massive. It will
examine every aspect of the department from personnel to real property to
weapons to supplies to bases. Some 2,400 auditors will fan out across the
department to conduct it, Pentagon officials said.
"It is important that the Congress and the
American people have confidence in DoD's management of every taxpayer dollar,"
Norquist said. -defense.gov
The Pentagon
is no stranger to criticism over serious waste and purposefully sloppy
accounting. A DoD Inspector General's report from 2016 - which appears to
be unavailable on
the DoD website (but fortunately WAS archived)- found
that in 2015 alone a staggering $6.5 trillion in funds was unaccounted for out
of the Army's budget, with $2.8 trillion in "wrongful adjustments" occurring
in just one quarter.
In 2015, the
Pentagon denied trying to shelve a study detailing $125
billion in waste created by a bloated employee counts for noncombat related
work such as human resources, finance, health care management and property
management. The report concluded that $125 billion could be saved by making
those operations more efficient.
On September 10th, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld announced that "According
to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions,"
after a Pentagon whistleblower set off a probe. A day later, the September 11th
attacks happened and the accounting scandal was quickly forgotten.
And twenty
years before that, DoD analyst Franklin C. Spinney exposed what he called "accounting games," saying "Those numbers are pie in the sky. The
books are cooked routinely year after year." In
a 2002 testimony before
the House Committee on Government Reform, Spinney laid out the DoD's accounting
quagmire of un-auditable books and budget projections which don't match
reality.
Finally,
those of us old enough to remember the 80's, let's not forget the bombshell
report on overpayments the Pentagon made for simple items, such as $37 screws, $7,622
coffee makers, and $640 toilet seats which Sen.
William Roth Jr (R-DE) was able to whittle down to $200.
The
announcement of the audit comes amid a looming government shutdown battle
which was given a two-week extension last week until December 22. If this
occurs, military personnel would report to work as usual, but the DoD
would not pay them until the shutdown ends.
"I cannot emphasize too much how destructive a
shutdown is," Norquist said. "We've talked before
about the importance of maintenance on weapons systems and others, but if it's
not an excepted activity, there'll be work stoppage on many of those
maintenance functions."
With both
parties standing to lose more than gain from a shutdown, that is unlikely to
happen. Meanwhile, with decades of lost confidence in the Pentagon's accounting
practices, we eagerly await the results of this "massive" audit to
see exactly how much dirt - and
where - previous administrations have swept under the rug.
