WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 22nd January, 2020) Poor accounting practices require the US Defense Department to rely on excessive adjustments to reconcile spending with Treasury data, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report on Wednesday.
"The Defense Finance and Accounting Service (DFAS) continues to rely on forced-balance adjustments to replace the financial information that DOD's [Department of Defense] components submit to force agreement with Department of the Treasury balances without reconciling and researching the cause of differences," the report said.
The GAO attributed the Defense Department's reliance on "nonroutine adjustments" to "deficient business processes and limitations in accounting systems," the report added.
While DOD and DFAS have undertaken initiatives to decrease the use of adjustments, neither has developed specific strategies or detailed issues that contribute to the need for adjustments, according to the report.
The report noted that DOD remains the only major US agency that has been unable to obtain a clean audit, and blamed the failure, in part, on the prevalence of adjustments in its accounts.
