Sen. Grassley has been a watchdog for good government and taxpayers for many years and has conducted extensive oversight work of the Department of Defense (DOD). Grassley has repeatedly called for increased transparency, accountability and efficient use of federal funds, most recently in the article featured below and in an op-ed examining government spending in Afghanistan.
Massive Pentagon agency lost track of hundreds of millions of dollars
Bryan Bender
February 5, 2018
One of the Pentagon’s largest agencies can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending, a leading accounting firm says in an internal audit obtained by POLITICO that arrives just as President Donald Trump is proposing a boost in the military budget.
Ernst & Young found that the Defense Logistics Agency failed to properly document more than $800 million in construction projects, just one of a series of examples where it lacks a paper trail for millions of dollars in property and equipment. Across the board, its financial management is so weak that its leaders and oversight bodies have no reliable way to track the huge sums it’s responsible for, the firm warned in its initial audit of the massive Pentagon purchasing agent.
The audit, obtained by POLITICO, raises new questions about whether the Defense Department can responsibly manage its $700 billion annual budget — let alone the additional billions that Trump plans to propose this month. The department has never undergone a full audit despite a congressional mandate — and to some lawmakers, the messy state of the Defense Logistics Agency’s books indicates one may never even be possible.
“If you can’t follow the money, you aren’t going to be able to do an audit,” said Senator Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican and senior member of the budget and finance committees, who has pushed successive administrations to clean up the Pentagon’s notoriously wasteful and disorganized accounting system.
Grassley — who was fiercely critical when a clean audit opinion of the Marine Corps had to be pulled in 2015 for “bogus conclusions” — has repeatedly charged that “keeping track of the people’s money may not be in the Pentagon’s DNA.”
He remains deeply doubtful about the prospects going forward given what is being uncovered.
“I think the odds of a successful DoD audit down the road are zero,” Grassley said in an interview. “The feeder systems can’t provide data. They are doomed to failure before they ever get started.”
But he said he supports the continuing effort even if a full, clean audit of the Pentagon can never be done. It is widely viewed as only way to improve the management of such huge sums of taxpayer dollars.
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