The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) cannot render an opinion on the 2010 consolidated financial statements of the federal government, because of widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations.
“Even though significant progress has been made since the enactment of key financial management reforms in the 1990s, our report on the U.S. government’s consolidated financial statement illustrates that much work remains to be done to improve federal financial management. Shortcomings in three areas again prevented us from expressing an opinion on the accrual-based financial statements,” said Gene Dodaro, Acting Comptroller General of the United States.
The main obstacles to a GAO opinion were: (1) serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) that made its financial statements unauditable, (2) the federal government’s inability to adequately account for and reconcile intragovernmental activity and balances between federal agencies, and (3) the federal government’s ineffective process for preparing the consolidated financial statements.Yikes. That's downright scary. What's worse is that this is the FOURTEENTH STRAIGHT YEAR that the GAO has been unable to render an opinion--the federal government's books are literally in such disarray that they cannot be audited.
It's nice when the government steps up and says that they're going to be accountable, but when it so brutally ignores the advice coming from a watchdog agency of its own creation, it's hard to take them seriously. For 14 years across three Presidential administrations (evenly split between the two parties), our federal books have been so bad as to make them illegible--rather than making progress, it's pretty clear that we've in fact regressed. That's pathetic. We have no prayer of ever balancing our books until we have some way of reading them first.
[U.S. Government Accountability Office]
(h/t BizzyBlog)
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