Surprise! Pentagon Fails Audit for Sixth Year in a Row

The US has by-far the world’s largest military budget, spending $877 billion on it last year - more than the next 10 countries combined. It has a network of more than 800 military bases around the globe and is involved directly or indirectly through supplying a participating power with funds or weapons, in numerous conflicts.

The US Department of Defense (DoD)has once again failed its financial audit, making the sixth consecutive year of failing to account for its expenditures.

After some 1,600 auditors and 700 site visits, the Pentagon has once again failed to account for all of its massive swath of programs and expenses.

The Pentagon has some $3.8 trillion in assets and another $4.0 trillion in liabilities.

The failure “is not a surprise,” Michael J. McCord, the US undersecretary of defense comptroller and the DoD's chief financial officer, told reporters at the Pentagon. “It certainly is not something that we say, ‘it doesn’t matter.’”

In a news release on Thursday, the Pentagon said it had made “incremental progress” toward a clean audit this year.

"As of Nov. 13, the auditors had validated that we had closed 490 of last year's 3,008 findings, and we expect that total will continue to increase as the numbers get finalized," McCord was quoted as saying in the release.

"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 added. "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.”

While the recent months of increased military aid for Kiev and Jerusalem were not included in the audit, which focused on 2022, Washington still sent $43.9 billion in “security assistance” to Ukraine last year, including substantial parts of its stocks of certain weapons.

Because it was given to Ukraine virtually without oversight, the vast volume of aid has aroused anger and suspicion among some US lawmakers and politicos, who have demanded a halt to aid shipments until methods of accountability can be established.

The audit found no explicit evidence of fraud. Of the 29 sub-audits, only seven were given passing grades, with one being described as “qualified,” 18 being given failing grades, and three still ongoing.

The DoD has set a goal of having a “clean” audit by fiscal year 2027.