Posted on 01/07/2018 5:12:19 AM PST by Oshkalaboomboom
When David Norquist came to the Senate for his confirmation hearing to be Defense Department comptroller in May, he declared, “It is time to audit the Pentagon.”
He laid out a get-tough approach to members of the Armed Services Committee who were eager after years of delays for the military to finally get its financial books in order. The new push would include “calling out” individuals in the Pentagon who were creating weaknesses in the financial reporting of an estimated $2.4 trillion in assets.
Norquist, the brother of Republican tax activist Grover Norquist, was quickly confirmed the same month and announced in December that the audit had commenced.
Now, Norquist is set to return to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to testify before the House Armed Services Committee on his progress so far.
“This financial statement audit is one of the largest ever undertaken in history,” Norquist said last month.
Laws passed in the early 1990s require all federal agencies and departments to submit to a full review of their finances each year. The individual military services have been working toward that goal for years — the Marine Corps became the first service to run an audit last year — but the Pentagon remains the only federal department that has not been fully audited.
The department cannot account for exactly how or where all of its money and resources are used. In recent years, the Defense Department inspector general found the Army made trillions of dollars in improper accounting adjustments to balance its books and the Defense Business Board reported the department could save about $125 billion over five years by eliminating back-office bureaucracy.
About 1,200 auditors will now comb through the military’s books and look at nearly every aspect of the armed services and issue a report, according to the department. Norquist has promised that will now happen annually.
“Beginning in 2018, our annual audits will occur every single year with the reports issued on Nov. 15,” said Norquist, who was the chief financial officer at the Department of Homeland Security when that agency performed its first audit.
But do not expect the Pentagon to pass the audit even if it is completed as Norquist promised, said Dan Grazier, a fellow at the Project on Government Oversight watchdog group.
“The important issue is going through the process of actually auditing the Pentagon,” Grazier said. “I don’t think anybody really expects a clean audit the first time around but it’s important to establish kind of a baseline and to figure out where to progress from there.”
The maiden audit also comes just as the Trump administration and defense hawks in Congress are pushing to hike funding for defense. Grazier said getting the military finances in order would be key to knowing how to wisely spend the money.
“We have service leaders going up to Capitol Hill all the time saying that they need more resources,” he said. “But we don’t really know that because we don’t know how all of the resources, the abundant resources frankly, that they are receiving are being spent.”
Yes, the “use it or lose it” problem in a bureaucracy.
One of my criteria of evaluation, as a bureaucrat was: Spent all the funds allocated to him.
I remember the September drill well.
One year in the 1990s, we had some competent people on base who started the ‘LIST’ on the first of October, and it was built to funnel this fallout money into things that people would come to appreciate (new mattresses for the barracks people, upgrade to a kid’s playground on base, library books, etc). It was the first time that some sense was put into this and everyone felt this was better than the unplanned mess.
So for ten months we proceeded. Then along came August and some new base chief master sergeant arrived. He walked into the next-to-last meeting of the group and wanted almost half of the total funding to be thrown at fifty state flagpoles and some new memorial park to replace the old memorial park. That was the end of the planning group, and no one ever took planning serious from that point on.
That is the mindset in every government office, and most corporations.
Tell someone they are not going to get the same amount next year, and they freak out.
>>Yes, the “use it or lose it” problem in a bureaucracy.
Doesn’t seem to be a “problem” for the PHDs at the AFA who keep a herd of $10000 interns they “wouldn’t trust to do any actual work”.
At least if the PeeHDee I listened to as they bragged about that on New Years Eve is any indicator.
3 words made his home-schooling “godly” eyes get real bigly wide-open: Drain The Swamp!
We should quit assigning accountants after the fact to track what happened to money. They should be assigned one accountant per 15 billion increment to track what happens to money in terms of the intent for which it was appropriated. They should track every dollar but have a required line item for every $100,000.
“They should be assigned one accountant per 15 billion increment to track what happens to money in terms of the intent for which it was appropriated. “
As a project manager I might have had X dollars allocated to pay for something that has been overcome by events. The money is in the budget, but not usable. Then, we run into a problem that may result in cancelling the program. There was no way for me to transfer the money from where it is misallocated to resolve the problem. A fifty-four million dollar project gets cancelled.
Making the military budget make sense according to changing reality is not an easy issue. And, usually the accountants are the last people who can help resolve issues. What we need are honest program managers on the military side who can be trusted to make wise decisions. Some of the ones I dealt with had little or no knowledge about the projects they were leading. (The Army was especially bad. The Navy was the best and most knowledgeable, followed by the Air Force.)
All i want is for them to track the money, not determine its disposition.
And don’t forget your capital expenditures budget goes up 30% next year to cover inflation and your increased wishes, not needs. You remember those. Those are the orders that never make it off the base line examination from the bean counters long before they make it to congress.
rwood
Making the military budget make sense according to changing reality is not an easy issue. And, usually the accountants are the last people who can help resolve issues. What we need are honest program managers on the military side who can be trusted to make wise decisions.
You need flexibility and accountability together.
Otherwise exactly what you mentioned happens. Everyone gets tied up in following multitudinous, minute rules, and little positive gets done.
Most government departments (local, state, and national) could use an honest, detailed, and through audit.
Same mindset on the part of the government contractors, from my experience of almost 40 years ago.
As a former Supply Sergeant in the US Army, I know all about “use it or lose it”. Couldn’t tell you how many hundreds of thousands of dollars I “wasted” over the years, but I was just following orders. Sad but true.
“”Laws passed in the early 1990s require all federal agencies and departments to submit to a full review of their finances each year””
And what results have we been given for all the other federal agencies? I don’t recall any.....
Also doesn’t help that the money doesn’t get sent down to the using organization to award until sometimes over a 1/4th of the way into the FY because Congress can’t get it approved.
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