Political Quotes

“Mr. President, yesterday a very important Government Accountability Office report came out. I am going to present my view of that report in a little bit backward way by giving a summary before I speak about the fine points of this report. Broken bookkeeping has plagued the Pentagon for years. Under deadline pressure, the Marine Corps claimed to be ready for a clean audit. An outside auditing firm produced work papers in support of an opinion on a clean audit that employees in the Defense Department inspector general's office found lacking. However, a manager in the inspector general's office overruled his lower level colleagues. That resulted in the inspector general's release of a clean opinion on the audit of the Marine Corps. Meanwhile, work papers began to creep out of the bureaucracy showing the unsupported basis for such a clean opinion. The inspector general was then forced to withdraw that opinion. Now the Government Accountability Office is releasing a report that exposes the whole house of cards. One senior employee with an apparent bias toward the outside auditing firm led his agency down the wrong path. We need to get things back on track and prevent an embarrassing setback like this from ever happening again. I will go into those details. As I often do, I come to the floor to speak about the latest twist in the 25-year struggle to fix the Defense Department's broken accounting system.…”