Audit

Milwaukee Demands Community Control Over Jail Audit

December 2, 2024 Fight Back! News. Resist! Audit, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Injustice, Milwaukee, Prisoner rights, Wisconsin

Milwaukee, WI – On Monday, November 25, the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression held a press conference to comment on the recent findings of the jail audit that was released the week before. Two inmates’ mothers, Laquita Dunlap and Kerrie Hirte, spoke of their fights for justice and accountability. The audit was conducted with input from fewer than 40 inmates, and with no public transparency or input whatsoever. The public expected to hear a preliminary report in December with the full audit report coming in 2025. Instead, the entire report was released suddenly and without any forewarning in November of 2024.

Pentagon Fails Seventh Straight Audit

November 19, 2024 Jake Johnson, Common Dreams. Educate! Audit, Finance and the Economy, Military Budget, Pentagon

The Pentagon announced late last week that it failed its seventh consecutive audit as the sprawling, profiteering-ridden department wasn't able to fully account for its trillions of dollars in assets. As with its past failures to achieve a clean audit, the U.S. Defense Department attempted to cast the 2024 results in a positive light, with the Pentagon's chief financial officer declaring in a statement that "momentum is on our side." The Pentagon is the largest U.S. federal agency and is responsible for roughly half of the government's annual discretionary spending, with its yearly budget approaching $1 trillion despite long-standing concerns about the department's inability to account for vast sums of money approved by lawmakers and presidents from both major parties.

The Pentagon Just Can’t Pass An Audit

November 30, 2023 Lindsay Koshgarian, Scheer Post. Educate! Audit, Congress, Finance and the Economy, Pentagon, Social Programs

The Pentagon just failed its audit — again. For the sixth time in a row, the agency that accounts for half the money Congress approves each year can’t figure out what it did with all that money. For a brief recap, the Pentagon has never passed an audit. Until 2018, it had never even completed one. Since then, the Pentagon has done an audit every year and given itself a participation prize each time. Yet despite this year’s triumphant press release — titled “DOD Makes Incremental Progress Towards Clean Audit” — it has failed every time. In its most recent audit, the Pentagon was able to account for just half of its $3.8 trillion in assets (including equipment, facilities, etc).

An Independent Audit Of US Funding For Ukraine

June 30, 2023 Heather Kaiser, Anya Parampil and Max Blumenthal, The Grayzone. Educate! Audit, Pentagon, Russia, Ukraine, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

During a recent discussion with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, touted her organization’s push to guarantee transparency for US taxpayer funds sent to Ukraine. “We are involved in funding efforts at ensuring judicial integrity, which is intrinsically important to building Ukraine’s democracy and its integration plans to get into Europe,” Power declared, adding USAID’s work in Ukraine was “also really important in terms of assuring the taxpayer, the American taxpayer, that they’re resources are well spent.”

The Pentagon Fails Its Fifth Audit In A Row

November 26, 2022 Connor Echols, Responsible Statecraft. Educate! Accountability, Audit, Pentagon, Wars and Militarism

Last week, the Department of Defense revealed that it had failed its fifth consecutive audit. “I would not say that we flunked,” said DoD Comptroller Mike McCord, although his office did note that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. “The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want.” The news came as no surprise to Pentagon watchers. After all, the U.S. military has the distinction of being the only U.S. government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit. But what did raise some eyebrows was the fact that DoD made almost no progress in this year’s bookkeeping: Of the 27 areas investigated, only seven earned a clean bill of financial health, which McCord described as “basically the same picture as last year.”

Pentagon Fails Audit (Again!)

January 2, 2022 Dave Lindorff, Counter Punch. Educate! Audit, Media, Pentagon, Wars and Militarism

That’s what should have been the biggest news of 2021. Instead, the story, which broke on November 17, was largely ignored or buried. The nation’s two main newspapers, the Washington Post and the New York Times, have simply ignored it. Other news organizations stenographically quoted Pentagon officials as admitting that they “failed again” but saw “progress,” and as promising that they would achieve a “clean” audit by… get this … 2027. The Pentagon, with some $3 trillion (give or take a trillion but who’s counting?) in assets and a record current 2021 budget of $738 billion, has for the third year in a row failed its audit. An army of 1400 auditors hired by us taxpayers for $230 million and borrowed from some of the biggest auditing firms in the country, spent the past year poring through the books and visiting hundreds of operations of the government’s largest and geographically vastest single agency, and came back with word that they couldn’t give it a pass.

E-Voting Machines Need Paper Audits To Be Trustworthy

December 6, 2016 Jacob Hoffman-Andrews, www.eff.org Create! Audit, Elections, Voting

By Jacob Hoffman-Andrews for EFF - Election security experts concerned about voting machines are calling for an audit of ballots in the three states where the presidential election was very close: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. We agree. This is an important election safety measure and should happen in all elections, not just those that have a razor-thin margin. Voting machines, especially those that have digital components, are intrinsically susceptible to being hacked. The main protection against hacking is for voting machines to provide an auditable paper trail.

House Votes To Audit Federal Reserve

September 20, 2014 Carey Wedler, www.theantimedia.org Organize! Audit, Congress, Federal Reserve

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 333-92 to audit the Federal Reserve, the nation’s private, central bank. The Federal Reserve Accountability and Transparency Act, bolstered by bipartisan backing, could demand more disclosures from the secretive Federal Reserve if passed in the Senate. The bill was introduced by Republican representative Paul Broun of Georgia and is a newer incarnation of former Texas Congressman Ron Paul’s 2012 Federal Reserve Transparency Act. At that time, it passed in the House with a 327-98 vote but stalled in the Senate due to Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s resistance. Though Reid supported an audit in the 1990s, by 2012 his position shifted.

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