Report: DOD Auditor Knowingly Approved Marine Corps' Shady Records
It’s no surprise that the Department of Defense likes to play fast and loose with their finances, but according to a new report from Reuters, the people that are supposed to be the DOD’s watchdog might be turning more of a blind eye than we realized. Despite giving the Marine Corps’s accounts an “unqualified approval” in December of 2013, the DOD’s Office of the Inspector General had been fully aware that its books weren’t up to par for months.
So it was likely no surprise to them when, just last March, the Office of the Inspector General actually withdrew its glowing audit “because subsequently discovered facts identified during the FY 2014 audit cause us to question the completeness of the information on which we based our opinion.” From Reuters:
The team members determined that the Corps had flunked the audit, and they recommended that the inspector general issue a “qualified” opinion. That would be equivalent to a failing grade, signifying that the inspector general couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of the financial statements reviewed. An “unqualified,” or clean, opinion means an auditor certifies that the books adhere to accounting standards and contain no material defects.
The team members were continually overruled, interviews and records show, by Daniel Blair, deputy inspector general for auditing.
Which might have been just another government oversight, except that, as Reuters points out, the DOD is the only federal agency that has yet to comply with a 23-year-old law requiring each government department to undergo annual audits. A fact that’s particularly concerning since “the Defense Department’s more than $500 billion a year in annual congressional appropriations is by far the largest budget of any government agency.”
A lot of the blame seems to have fallen on Grant Thornton, an outside accounting firm that was supposed to be acting as the neutral third party. However, the partner overseeing the audit apparently has a long history with Deputy Inspector General Blair—meaning that the DOD’s purportedly independent watchdog might not actually be all that independent.
Either way, the number of military branches that have successfully passed a financial audit in over twenty years is now back to a nice, round zero. You can read more about the Marine Corps’ questionable books over at Reuters here.
