Government Fails Fiscal-Fitness Test
By Kelly
Patricia O’Meara
Posted April 29, 2002
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What this gibberish means is that the DoD
still cannot account for at least $1.1 trillion from fiscal 2000
under former president Bill Clinton, and the assistant inspector
general of DOD wouldn't even touch the unsupported money expenditures
for fiscal 2001 because "material amounts" still couldn't
be accounted for properly in the year George W. Bush came to power.
The trillion-dollar question is how much is "material amounts"?
Because the auditor would not "quantify" the amount,
some fear it's worse than the previous year's unaccounted for
$1.1 trillion.
Of course the Department of the Army, headed
by former Enron executive Thomas White, had an excuse. In a shocking
appeal to sentiment it says it didn't publish a "stand-alone"
financial statement for 2001 because of "the loss of financial-management
personnel sustained during the Sept. 11 terrorist attack."
So where is that missing $1.1 trillion? Traditionally
the top dogs at the Pentagon haven't liked the word "missing."
The rationale at DoD has been that just because the money can't
be accounted for doesn't mean it is lost, stolen or strayed. According
to Susan Hansen, a spokeswoman for DoD: "These are unsupported
entries. When the auditors go to audit the books and they look
at the balance sheet for the year, someone has entered in an adjustment
because they made an error somewhere."
You see, continues Hansen: "They don't
carry the transaction across; there's no way they can track it
to where the adjustment first came from. These are called 'unsupported'
adjustments. In auditing you have to follow the trail from the
first time that the entry first enters the system to the time
it leaves it. In the Defense Department it means that if you bought
a piece of equipment and it moved from the Army to the Navy to
the Air Force over the course of years, you have to be sure that
piece of equipment and its dollar value is the same piece of equipment."
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