The government claims they are one of the three worst groups in the entire federal organization.
Worst in what way? Worst for stealing money? Or worst for returning accounts correctly?
One of the three? So there's a department worse than them? OMGZ someone update the conspiracy list.
Note that NASA is violating the law and their own rules in these two cases.
Are you going to call the police or shall I?
Adjusting accounts does not (immediately) mean stealing. And certainly not the 565 BILLION which you now seemed to have shyed away from.
Look, if you people want to debate this, how about reading the articles first?
http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/3013427(I also miscalled the mag... I mistakenly id'ed it as CEO, not CFO. My Bad.)
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has long been criticized for its inability to manage costs.
This is not news or a random thing I am talking about.Brown's explanation for the disclaimed audit may account for some of the problems identified in both the June 30, 2003, financials and the year-end audit ? but only some.
No one that has examined the data believes NASA when they say it's all computer error.PwC's audit found numerous basic reporting errors in the year-end and third-quarter financial statements that had nothing to do with the conversion, and which auditors said finance executives should have caught before filing the statements
They can't do their jobs. Why would someone hire somebody that can't do their job. To make it easier to steal, maybe?In addition, finance personnel responsible for converting the year-end data (and who racked up the $565 billion in adjustments) didn't have the skills they needed to do the job
NASA admits their people are poorly trained and useless. Again, why would anyone hire people like that?The disclaimed audit would not be as significant if it were just a one-off even, but in fact, NASA has a long-standing history of financial mismanagement. The agency's contract-management function has earned a spot on the GAO's "high risk" watch list every year since 1990 (see "Mission [out of] Control," at the end of this article). This year, NASA was 1 of only 3 federal agencies (out of 23) that received a disclaimed audit opinion.
Nineteen years on the list. That should tell anyone with a brain that something is seriously wrong.Other lowlights of NASA's financial history include the ISS audit, which the GAO has performed annually since 2000 to determine whether NASA is adhering to congressional spending caps placed on the ISS and related space-shuttle flights. In each audit,
the GAO auditors have been "unable to determine whether the obligations that NASA was reporting to Congress were accurate," says Gregory D. Kutz, director in the financial management assurance team at the GAO. Adds Kutz, "This is a problem that has been around NASA for a long time."
The latest GAO audit report, released in April, revealed that NASA didn't include any information on the ISS and shuttle obligations in its FY 2005 budget request, as required by law, "so we had nothing to audit this year," the report said
The GAO admits that NASA is in violation, but since there are no penalties for these violations, there's nothing anyone can do about it.In 2000, a $644 million oversight was discovered on NASA's 1999 financial audit. The mistake was detected not by its auditors (then Arthur Andersen) nor by its CFO (then Arnold Holz), but by a congressional staffer reviewing the statements
Some staff weinie found an error of an unspecified type... after the CFO and the Auditors missed it. Or was it ignored? How can you just miss 644 million dollars?Such institutionalized denial may have created a situation in which one hand of NASA doesn't know what the other is doing
Ten separate stations, each doing whatever they want... why would you set any agency up that way? It's illogical, wasteful and redundant. Unless you want to waste money and create problems. Of course, it is easier to steal in this kind of network since no one knows what's going on.Although NASA's institutional deficiencies are significant, some problems are exclusively the province of NASA's finance department. Based on its history, it appears that the team is just not very good at what it's supposed to do
Again, this is one of the best known agencies in the world. They could get great people to work for them. Instead, they hire people that are completely incapable of doing their job, give them half assed training and let them run with it. Why?In addition, despite opposition by the GAO, NASA still uses an accounting procedure that doesn't comply with government accounting regulations ? or even with NASA's own financial-management manual
They don't follow anyone's rules, not even their own.Perhaps the most fundamental problem with financial management at NASA is that the agency doesn't need to be financially accountable to get full funding for its projects. This lack of any consequence for the poor quality of its work makes dramatic improvement in NASA's finance department unlikely
What the hell? They don't have to account for their money, they can still get more money, there are no penalties for breaking the rules and no one holds them to account? Who the hell set this shit up and how do I get a job like this? Jeezus, if I fell into a set up like this, I would be seriously tempted to give myself a few perks... like 204 million dollars in "Other" with no documents to show what I did with it.But despite Brown's noble intentions, the truth is that even 14 years after passage of the 1990 Federal CFO Act, which requires federal agencies to produce auditable financial statements, a disclaimed audit opinion is still no big deal
The law always lags behind... People create crimes faster than the feds can pass laws but even with that, 14 years seems to be a bit much.Don't look to Congress to impose accountability on NASA's financials. This year's disclaimed audit opinion barely caused a blip on its radar screen
Huh? Twenty years of mismanagment, billions of dollars in losses and no one cares? What? You might think they were feeding at this gravy train.Every year since 1990, the General Accounting Office has kept NASA on its "high risk" watch list because of the agency's problems with contract management
NASA may have some brilliant astrophysicists on their payroll, but they appear to be hiring retarts for their accounting department....NASA's ability to collect, maintain, and report the full cost of its projects and programs is weakened by diverse and often incompatible center-level accounting systems and uneven and nonstandard cost-reporting capabilities....
Back to allowing each separate plant to make it's own accounting rules up. Huh?When first proposed in 1984, the International Space Station was supposed to cost $8 billion, but so far Congress has appropriated $32 billion for it.
Four times the supposed cost. You know, if I ran my house that way, I'd be a homeless welfare case or in jail in less than a year.
How does it stand that NASA can continually flaunt their inability to do anything that doesn't have to do with space and get away with it?
I can only think of two ways. They are slick enough not to get caught, which can't be the case or we wouldn't be having this debate.
The other way is to make sure that the people that could do something about it, (The Senate Finance Committee.) doesn't want to do anything about it.