The Pentagon’s chief financial officer Mike McCord said the Ukraine-Russia situation is a “teachable moment” for the United States. After failing its fifth audit, McCord explained the importance of “counting inventory, knowing where it is and knowing when it is [arriving].” The audit “should be helping us make sure that we don’t have the kind of problems of having something on our records that doesn’t exist in reality or having big discrepancies,” McCord continued.
From Air Force Times:
But he added that the DoD is still struggling with how it values its inventory and how to account for government property that’s in the possession of contractors ― particularly with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which is mostly built using a government-owned plant run by Lockheed Martin. The audit, which covered the department’s $3.5 trillion in assets and $3.7 trillion in liabilities, involved 1,600 auditors conducting 220 in-person site visits and 750 virtual site visits. The Pentagon inspector general and independent public accounting firms performed the audit, which was expected to cost $218 million this year. The 27 individual audits that comprise the effort yielded nine clean opinions, one modified opinion and disclaimers for the rest, which McCord said was on par with last year’s results. The number of the DoD’s material weaknesses also stayed steady at 28.
