On Wednesday, the Department of Defense (DOD) failed its sixth consecutive financial audit, even after Pentagon officials vowed to make improvements from previous years’ performances.
As reported by the Daily Caller, auditors gave a clean audit to just 7 of the DOD’s 29 sub-agencies, essentially no different than the results of the 2022 audit. The DOD currently has assets of $3.8 trillion and liabilities of $4 trillion, which encompasses locations in all 50 states, and 4,500 sites globally.
“Auditing the Department’s $3.8 trillion in assets and $4.0 trillion in liabilities is a massive undertaking,” said Pentagon comptroller Michael McCord. “But the improvements and changes we are making every day as a result of these audits positively affect every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, guardian and DOD civilian.”
The Pentagon first began auditing itself in 2018, becoming one of the last federal agencies to implement the practice after Congress passed a law in 1990 requiring all federal agencies to do so.
Of the 29 sub-agencies, 18 failed, while only one was rated as “qualified,” which is considered better than failed but still below “clean.” In addition to the 7 that were rated as clean, another three sub-agencies’ evaluations are still ongoing: The U.S. Marine Corps, the DOD Office of the Inspector General, and the Defense Information Systems Agency Working Capital Fund.
“It’s not enough,” said McCord following the announcement of the results. “The secretary [of defense] feels that we need to be doing better at this and moving faster.”
“I want to highlight that while we still have much work to do, our work on the audit over the last few years has yielded significant benefits to the department,” McCord continued, trying to highlight what he considered to be incremental progress. “Our efforts to track, coordinate and quickly deliver security systems to our allies and partners in Ukraine and now Israel is closely related to the work across the DOD enterprise on readiness.”