Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) accused the Department of Defense of continuing to neglect proper accounting techniques, casting further doubt on whether the agency will pass a long-awaited oversight test next fall.
Grassley questioned if Pentagon Chief Financial Officer Mike McCord has “a handle on the core problem,” which he described as a lack of accurate information.
“If [McCord] did, why would he continue throwing money at solutions that don’t produce what is needed most, and that is reliable transaction data?” Grassley asked Thursday, in a floor speech. “Why doesn’t he know that the same old garbage is still coming out of the other end of the sausage machine?”
In 2009, Congress passed a law ordering the Pentagon to merely be capable of subjecting itself to a financial audit by September 2017. Other agencies have been audit-ready, to varying degrees, for two decades, as a result of the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990.
When delivering his criticism, Grassley cited April testimony before Congress by the head Government Accountability Office, Gene Dodaro.
Dodaro said in April that the Pentagon was “not really fixing underlying problems” that stop it from being able to properly account for expenditures.
“They’re not fixing the internal control problems,” Dodaro said. “They can’t reconcile the balance between what they say they have and what Treasury says that they have.”
He also described the Department of Defense as “the main obstacle” to government-wide transparency, noting it owns 30 percent of the federal government’s assets and accounts for 15 percent of its net costs.
In June, McCord testified before a House committee, claiming that the Pentagon was “getting closer to full audit accountability and will stick to its plan to achieve it,” according to a DOD press release.
“We’re making progress, and we are fully committed to getting it done,” McCord said.
Grassley said, however, that it will be all for naught, if the Pentagon doesn’t drastically change the way it conducts business.
“In most businesses, transactions are transmitted instantaneously from the cash register or other points of origin, to finance and accounting,” Grassley said Thursday. At the Pentagon, he said, “they take a roundabout route” through bureaucratic mechanisms and “literally thousands of feeders.”
“Somewhere along the way, vital linkages are broken,” Grassley added. “And when ledgers and account balances are no longer hooked up to transactions, forget about auditing the books.”
