Charles E. Grassley: “There is a continuing and a dangerous crisis in financial management at the Department of Defense [DOD] and someone…”

“There is a continuing and a dangerous crisis in financial management at the Department of Defense [DOD] and someone needs to be held accountable for what's going on. The financial mess at the Pentagon was the subject of an excellent hearing before Senator Glenn's Governmental Affairs Committee on April 12, 1994. The testimony and discussion were devastating. I would like to briefly review what was said at the hearing and then followup on the need for accountability. The worst problem addressed at the hearing were unmatched disbursements. The easiest way to understand unmatched disbursements is to compare them to something the average American does every day like handling a credit card account. If we just go ahead and pay the amount shown in the box ``total due'' on our monthly statements without ever checking the items listed against our customer slips, we have something like DOD unmatched disbursements. If the matches are not made each month--and this becomes common knowledge like at DOD, then our credit card account could become vulnerable to fraudulent or erroneous charges by a crooked merchant. The same thing is going on at DOD but on a massive scale. The GAO says that DOD has at least $41 billion of unmatched disbursements; $41 billion in unmatched disbursements means millions and millions of DOD checks have not or cannot be linked to supporting documentation and contracts.…”