Mon, May 17, 2004
Auditing Firm Quits
Not only is America's space agency
beleaguered by the ongoing revamp of its shuttle program and a new,
underfunded vision for space exploration as put forth by
President Bush, but now it's in financial hot water. Its former
auditing firm, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, reports $565 billion posted
to NASA accounts has been riddled with significant errors and poor
documentation.
PriceWaterhouseCoopers reportedly quit its NASA assignment
because of the irregularities cited in the report.
The auditing firm says there have been major breakdowns in the
space agency's financial controls. Hundreds of millions of dollars
are unreconciled and there's a $2 billion discrepancy between what
NASA says it has and what's actually sitting in the agency's
accounts, according to a company report.
"The documentation NASA provided in
support of its September 30, 2003, financial statements was not
adequate to support $565 billion in adjustments to various
financial statement accounts," the auditor wrote in a Jan. 20
report to Robert Cobb, NASA's inspector general. The report also
mentioned "significant errors" in financial statements provided by
NASA.
The space agency says the discrepancies are the result of a huge
restructuring of its accounting system, which included account
consolidation and new accounting software. The other problem,
according to NASA officials, is that the agency operates ten "very
independent" research centers, all of which have different methods
for tracking cash.
Still, Shyam Sundar, a professor in accounting at the Yale
School of Management, says the space agencies accounts are "a big
mess."
"If NASA would have been a public company, the management would
have been fired by now," he said.
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