Perhaps the most difficult aspect of D.O.G.E.'s task in auditing federal government expenditure is that much of the latter is hidden from sight, and has to be dug out of the darker corners of our governing bureaucracy. Real Clear Investigations reports:
The total amount of spending across “all agencies,” as recorded at usaspending.gov, appears to be 50% higher than most experts interviewed for this article think it actually was.
In Fiscal Year 2024, for instance, the website pegs total spending at $9.7 trillion, when several experts said it was probably around $6.5 trillion. No one could explain the much bigger figure. Officials with usaspending.gov conceded to RCI that their totals were wrong and said the error, which shows up in similar fashion for the last five fiscal years would be fixed soon. They offered neither an explanation for their higher total nor an estimate of what it should be. Two weeks later, the erroneous figures remain.
. . .
The federal government has become so big and so expensive that even experts have trouble navigating the morass of contracts, awards, grants, loans, and other items that have transformed the U.S. spreadsheet into a labyrinth pitted with dead ends and rabbit holes ... The complexity and layers Musk’s team has encountered are a feature, not a bug, according to this view.
. . .
DOGE’s real accomplishment so far has been to bring attention to the federal government’s broken accounting systems.
Despite the hue and cry raised over DOGE, previous alarms have been rung by some other agencies only to be ignored.
On Jan. 16, four days before Biden vacated the White House, the Government Accounting Office said it was “unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.”
The Office of Management and Budget has also flunked six of the 24 departments and agencies it looked at, including Labor and Education. The Defense Department has failed seven consecutive audits, while the Department of Education hasn’t gotten a “clean” opinion for three years.
It is hard to pass an audit when you don’t follow the basic rules of accounting.
There's more at the link.
As the article says, the dysfunction built into federal accounting systems is a feature, not a bug. If something can't be properly audited, nobody can be held accountable for any malfeasance or criminal conduct, because it can't be proved. I daresay a lot of politicians have used that feature over the years to direct money to causes and projects that would make the average taxpayer scream in outrage if he knew about them. The USAID financial imbroglio tends to bear that out in microcosm. USAID is one agency out of well over 400 in the federal government. How much financial jiggery-pokery will we find in the rest of them? Will there be as much wasteful spending in them as we found in USAID, and if so, will we be able to recover it? Hopefully D.O.G.E. will be able to answer those questions.
Perhaps it's time to write into every expenditure bill that passes through Congress and the Senate a provision detailing how the money is to be accounted for, and what audits are mandated for its use over time. It would be nice to think that the normal audit procedures of the federal government would suffice, but clearly they haven't in the past, so why would they be good enough in future?
Peter
8 comments:
Perhaps it's time to write into every expenditure bill that passes through Congress and the Senate a provision detailing how the money is to be accounted for, and what audits are mandated for its use over time.
Remember, there hasn't been an actual federal budget passed since 2008. "Congress and the Senate" are the root cause of the problem. While having the group of computer experts that DOGE has assembled is great, they also need to be forensics experts because the "other side" is deliberately lying and concealing what they're doing.
If I understand correctly, the money went out on a check. One should be able to identify the one who cashed the check. Thus one could identify who got the money. Then one go back and check any authorization for that person to receive that money. With no authorization, that becomes stolen money (same as would be figured on your bank account). That part though is not directly part of the DOGE search. As mentioned above, this needs a forensic expert.
So do we know our true national debt?
Years ago, I had a boss that proposed we stop producing reports just to see if they were really needed. If no one objected, we stopped producing that daily/monthly/weekly report. I think the same should be true of government expenditures. Stop the outflow of funds until they are proven to be legitimate. Seems simple enough to me.
The original intent was for congress to write bills that included all of the details. However, over time congress got lazy and wrote bills in a manner that they left the details up to the bureaucrats running the various departments and agencies which is how the government has come to be so bloated and out of control.
SiG beat me to it.
If it cannot be properly audited then there is fraud and the Dept should be held accountable from the top down
We need "The Accountant".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accountant_(2016_film)
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