Pentagon Fails 6th Audit in a Row and Their Excuses Are Hilarious

There's "progress sort of beneath the surface of a pass fail," said the Pentagon Comptroller

The Pentagon just failed its sixth audit in a row, leading to some Bart Simpson level excuses from their spokespersons, which I’ve reported on for The Intercept. You can practically smell the bullshit wafting off them. Below are three of the stinkiest.

1. There’s “progress sort of beneath the surface of a pass-fail”

   “But yes, what I’m talking about is progress sort of beneath the surface of a pass-fail for the entire Army,” Pentagon Comptroller Michael J. McCord said in a press conference about the audit.

   The audacity is honestly kind of impressive. It’s the kind of thing a kid who hasn’t cleaned his room tells his parents, except in this case the kid is the largest government agency in existence with a budget of over $800 billion and the parent is the American taxpayer.

Can’t help but respect the hustle.

2. “We keep getting better and better at it”

   “That's why each time we go through this audit process, even if it is our sixth time we keep going through the process,” Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh said of the audit. “We keep getting better and better at it.”

   Better at failing audits? Fair enough: as the Comptroller himself acknowledged, there was actually an increase in the number of cases where the Pentagon did not provide auditors sufficient records to even carry out the audit this year versus last. So if anything, the audits are getting worse.

3. “DOD Makes Incremental Progress Toward a Clean Audit”

   That’s the headline the Pentagon went with for its press release about the failed audit. But if you look at the fine print, the audit yielded the exact same the number of “modified opinions” — when an auditor deems that a financial statement is presented fairly — as last year’s audit. “It was static from last year,” the Comptroller conceded.

   Though the Defense Department had previously said it would pass an audit by 2027, when asked about a timeline, the Pentagon now says it doesn’t know — but that it does know it’ll pass eventually. “It’s a known unknown,” a reporter cracked during the press conference, a reference to the late Bush administration Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous characterization of WMD in Iraq.

   Another thing the Pentagon knows is that it’s “inevitable” that its budget will swell to $1 trillion, as the Comptroller said earlier this year.

Take a wild guess which will come first: the $1 trillion or a clean audit.