by Dave Gonigam
Daily Reckoning
Another year, another failed audit for Uncle Sam. Funny, you haven’t heard any of the presidential candidates talk about it, either.
Since 1997, the Government Accountability Office has audited the federal government. Or tried to, anyway. It never works out: Try as the auditors might to come up with an opinion on the government’s consolidated financial statements, the numbers are just too murky.
This year, there were “issues with the Department of Defense’s finances, the government’s inability to account for some transactions and the government’s ineffective report-preparing process,” as described by the Beltway-insider publication The Hill.