In February of 2019, Mark Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts published the report “Should We Care about Secrecy in Financial Reporting?” (Skidmore and Fitts, 2019), which provided a review and assessment of the state of federal government financial reporting and the lack of transparency therein.
Since that report was published, several new developments have emerged. In this document, we provide an update on the state of federal government financial reporting on both uses and sources of revenue. We begin with a discussion of uses. On the uses side, we discuss new information from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) regarding 170 unsupported journal voucher adjustments tallying to $2.1 trillion.
These 170 adjustments were briefly mentioned in a 2016 OIG document for the fiscal year 2015 Army General Fund financial report in which the Army was found to have $6.5 trillion in unsupported journal voucher adjustments in that year. We also discuss a request by the Department of Defense to conceal future spending projections. Read more
