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Posted on 04/30/2025 8:25:42 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Imagine a vast ledger, chronicling the transactions of a mighty republic, now riddled with deliberate gaps and omissions, gaps no auditor may probe, no citizen may question. This is no fanciful dystopia, but the present reality, quietly authorized by what is known as Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56 (SFFAS 56). While initially crafted, perhaps, with honorable intentions to shield 'classified' operations from hostile eyes, SFFAS 56 now threatens the very transparency and public accountability that sustain a free government. Federal agencies are allowed to use SFFAS 56 to hide spending they desire to be 'classified' from the American people, Congress, and even the President of the United States.
What is SFFAS 56? At its core, it is an administrative rule issued by the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) in 2018, not a statute passed by Congress. It allows any federal agency to modify its financial statements in order to obscure sensitive national security information. This authority extends beyond the obvious domains of intelligence or defense, touching every department that produces General Purpose Federal Financial Reports, from USAID to the Department of Energy. In theory, this safeguard exists to prevent enemies from exploiting financial disclosures to learn state secrets. In practice, it creates a black hole into which billions of taxpayer dollars vanish without a trace.
To understand the peril, one must first grasp the astonishing breadth of the rule. Under SFFAS 56, agencies may alter financial reports by removing, aggregating, or fabricating information, provided these adjustments do not "materially" affect the reported net results. Further, agencies can exclude entire sub-entities from reports or consolidate them elsewhere, masking not merely amounts but organizational structures themselves. Crucially, neither the public nor Congress is afforded any right to know when these modifications occur, how often they happen, or the underlying reasons. A general, but nonspecific, disclaimer suffices, buried in the back pages of thick agency reports: "Accounting standards allow certain presentations and disclosures to be modified to prevent the disclosure of classified information."
Even Congress itself can be kept in the dark unless an agency, by its own volition, deigns to disclose the concealment. Thus, SFFAS 56 effectively removes the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse from critical oversight. It conjures a legal purgatory where funds can be appropriated for one purpose, redirected for another, and hidden altogether from elected representatives. The theoretical protections against abuse, internal controls, audits, classified oversight, are weak reeds indeed when the very financial data needed to detect mischief has been sanitized.
Proponents of SFFAS 56 argue that, without such protections, enemies could piece together vital intelligence from innocent-looking financial entries. Yet the ingenuity of our foes cannot justify the abandonment of self-government. If secrecy is to be justified, it must be rare, tightly controlled, and explicitly authorized by the people’s elected representatives. Instead, SFFAS 56 inverts the burden: concealment becomes the default, accountability the exception. One might as well argue that because a handful of bank robbers lurk at large, all citizens must henceforth veil their account balances from scrutiny.
History offers sobering lessons when governments assume powers of secret spending. The clandestine financing of "black ops" during the Cold War, sometimes used for noble ends, sometimes for ignoble, occurred under conditions of limited and direct congressional oversight. Even then, abuses proliferated. The Iran-Contra affair revealed how easily noble motives could give way to clandestine mischief when oversight was thwarted. Now, SFFAS 56 institutionalizes a structure far broader and more opaque than anything Colonel Oliver North could have dreamed.....SNIP
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No wonder no one can bring spending under control.
They had cases where people literally went into their offices , closed the door and did nothing at all for years on end.
The only reason they were discovered was because the Cold War ended.
Statement of Federal Financial Accounting Standards 56 (SFFAS 56):
<><>effectively remove the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse from critical oversight.
<><>conjures a legal purgatory where funds can be appropriated for one purpose,
<><>redirected for another,
<><>and hidden altogether from elected representatives.
<><>theoretical protections against abuse, internal controls, audits, classified oversight, are weak
<><>b/c the very financial data needed to detect mischief has been sanitized.
nothing less than legalized theft of taxpayer dollars.
......nothing less than legalized theft of taxpayer dollars........
Sums it up perfectly.
What if there was a rule that for every dollar an agency spent that was lost, misdirected, spent secretly without knowledge or agreement with the taxpayer ---
--- For every dollar stolen, a dollar was taken from the agency's budget?
What? $100M unaccounted for? That means you get $100M less money next year...
I know it ain't that easy, but you get the idea.
“...effectively remove the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse from critical oversight....”
Impossible.
No law, bureaucratic rule, executive policy or order can do that..............
“...effectively removes the legislature’s constitutional power of the purse from critical oversight....” Impossible. No law, bureaucratic rule, executive policy or order can do that..............
Gasp......I honestly never knew you were a “true believer.”
🤗........................
I assumed there was one or more back channel finance shenanigans in place besides USAID. Seems obvious since democrats were screaming and attacking DOGE and the dismantling of USAID. They protested too much as their latest distraction technique.
What I want to know that is missing from the article is, who are these “proponents of SFFAS?”
And as usual Congress does nothing
No wonder DOGE can’t get to finding $1 TRILLION+ in waste, fraud and abuse...
It says the bottom line is (ostensibly) accurate, but they obfuscate where the money was spend and for what purpose. I wonder how many agencies do this and the aggregate amount that has been hidden / obfuscated.
How much of this money went to nefarious uses like paying Soros and his foundations, paying NGOs, bringing in illegals and flying them all over the interior of the country, and generally undermining the USA?
It’s not secret any longer apparently.
The fools really think they can hide stuff from Elon’s tech geniuses?
How about setting up select committees in Congress that are told the whole unvarnished truth? Then they can figure out if national security would truly be threatened or compromised by releasing the financial information. Congress is not the most trustworthy organization, but at least there would be SOME outside eyeballs on the expenditures.
I wonder how much money is surreptitiously spent this way. Billions? Hundreds of billions? More?
It starts with the intentional increase in size and increase in complexity of federal agencies, into which has been added both Congressional and Executive decisions as to what constitutes an expenditure a “national security” related, and with very opague detail of that from Congress and intentional obscurity given it by the Executive branch.
In pretending that so much Is “national security” related, they are pretending it is all protecting the people by keeping the information out of foreign exposure, when in fact it is also to keep the American people in the dark for the purpose of protecting federal agencies against the public protest of their activtities.
Greg Hunter at USAWatchdog.com has ben covering SFFAS 56 from the beginning.
And yet they did, without consequence because they money is spread around to the right people.
Government attracts thieves for the same reason Willie Sutton chose banks to rob instead of grocery stores.
Drug cartels could not exist without the cooperation of police, Judges, Banks and Politicians. Neither can the organized theft of taxpayer money.
There are few outsider eyeballs in the Club, but some positions do pay a little better than others, just the cost of putting blinders on those eyeballs.
Are we really so deluded that we think the people in office are too stupid to know how to get rich at our expense?
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