A senior House Republican called on the government’s top watchdog Wednesday to investigate the Defense Department after the Pentagon failed its seventh consecutive audit.
Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, who chairs the House Oversight subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce, urged Government Accountability Office chief Gene Dodaro to investigate the Pentagon for “its failure to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.”
“This will allow us to track DOD’s progress toward achieving a clean audit opinion as well as progress in key areas that support a clean audit — the status of DOD financial management system modernization efforts and compliance with relevant legislative requirements,” Mr. Sessions wrote.
The Defense Department receives nearly half of all federal spending, and its physical assets make up over 70% of the government’s physical assets, he wrote. Its annual budget is more than $900 billion.
His request to GAO to continue oversight of the Pentagon comes on the heels of the Defense Department’s announcement last month that it had received a “disclaimer of opinion” for its audit of fiscal 2024. It means that the highest-funded agency in the federal government has failed every audit since the scrutiny was first required in 2018.
The incoming Trump administration also will launch a government-wide effort to trim spending and cut out waste in the new year.
Mike McCord, the Defense Department’s chief financial officer, said the agency has improved and is on track to have a clean audit by fiscal 2028.
“We do have to keep getting faster and keep getting better,” Mr. McCord said in a statement. “If you draw a trend line back from when we started, from year one to year seven, I don’t think it’s going to show you’re getting there in time if you don’t continue to pick up the pace and that happens with a lot of programs, there’s learning curves in building airplanes and there needs to be a learning curve here, too.”
Mr. Session’s letter comes after a September hearing of the subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce that developed a scorecard, in conjunction with the GAO, to rate the Pentagon’s financial management practices and path toward passing an audit. He wrote that the agency received “mostly failing grades across the board.”
The GAO continues to designate Defense Department’s financial management and business systems modernization efforts as “high risk” because of deficiencies in the Pentagon’s business processes, internal controls, financial reporting, and financial management systems, Mr. Sessions said. He did say that the agency has steadily improved over time.
“Currently, significant challenges remain and DOD remains the only major agency that has never been able to achieve a clean audit opinion,” he wrote.
• Alex Miller can be reached at amiller@washingtontimes.com.
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