Political Quotes

“I come to the floor today to alert the new Trump administration to a problem in the Defense Department. There is a festering sore needing high-level attention. I am talking about what turns out to be a formidable barrier. It stands in the way of an important goal: auditing the books of the Department of Defense. At times, this barrier makes the goal seem unattainable. The need for annual financial audits was originally established by the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. By March of 1992, each agency was to present a financial statement to an inspector general for audit. Today, all have earned unqualified or clean opinions, except one, and guess what. The Department of Defense is that one. It has the dubious distinction, out of all of the Federal Government, of earning an unblemished string of failing opinions known as disclaimers. In the face of endless stumbling, Congress drew a new line in the sand. It is in section 1003 of the fiscal year 2010 National Defense Authorization Act. The Pentagon was given an extra 7 years to clean up the books and get ready. Guess what. The slipping and sliding never stopped. The revised September 2017 deadline is staring us in the face, and all the evidence tells us the Department will never make it. The 25-year effort to audit the books is stuck in the mud. Billions of dollars have been spent trying to solve the root cause of the problem, and that root cause is a broken accounting system. But the fix is nowhere in sight.…”