Political Quotes

“at least two times in the last couple of months I have come to the floor to tell my colleagues about some work I am doing on investigation of waste, fraud, and abuse in the Defense Department and primarily to focus them on the work of the Inspector General's Office in regard to how they do audits. So I come to the floor today to renew my call for better audit reports. As a Senator dedicated to watchdogging the taxpayers' money, audits are a primary instrument in my toolbox. They are like a hammer and a wrench. They are the tools of the trade. But like other Members of Congress conducting oversight, I can't do audits. We don't have staff for that, so we must rely on the inspectors general of the various departments to do the independent audits of the work of those departments. So today I speak about the Defense Department inspector general. The audit should be the inspector general's primary weapon for rooting out fraud, waste, and theft. Audits should be the tip of their spear, and that spear should have a very sharp point. The mere possibility of audit should have the fraudsters--people who commit fraud--quaking in their boots, but that is not the way it is, at least not at the Defense Department. The audit weapon belonging to the Defense Department's inspector general is not as effective as it should be. This problem is not entirely the inspector general's own doing. The broken Defense Department accounting system is also to blame.…”