Too many trucks, too many zeros: Army audit drive exposes flaws as Pentagon nears 2028 goal

WASHINGTON, July 22 (Reuters) - From too many zeros to too few, and even the letter 'O' typed in its place, the new systems at the Pentagon have uncovered a trail of mistakes as the Defense Department pursues its first clean audit.

After years of work, the Pentagon is on track to pass its first-ever financial audit in 2028, the U.S. Army's top financial officer told Reuters, a breakthrough for an agency that manages nearly $1 trillion a year but has never been able to fully account for its spending.

Since 2018, the Pentagon has undergone annual audits assessing how it tracks weapons, property and personnel across its global operations. The audit was congressionally mandated in a bill passed in 1990, but department-wide audits began in 2018 after delays and reprieves.

Repeated failures have revealed gaps in the department's financial systems, making it difficult to trace government funds from the time they are allocated until they are spent. 

After failing its eighth consecutive audit in December, the acting Pentagon chief financial officer Jules Hurst said at the time it was "committed to resolving its critical issues and achieving an unmodified audit opinion by 2028."

The task has been daunting. For example, the Army, which alongside the Navy and Air Force makes up the bulk of the U.S. military, operated more than 1,300 separate business systems in 2019, a number that has since been cut to about 200. New technology to view all Army spending at once came online in June, leading to several breakthroughs.

"We're on track, and we feel confident that we'll be part of the overall opinion issued for the department in '28," said Marc Andersen, the Army's comptroller, referring to passing a consolidated Pentagon-wide audit in 2028.

TOO MANY TRUCKS

Natasha Anderson, the Army's director of financial operations and accounting, said pulling data from many systems into one system called 'Army Fiscal Frontline' brought to light problems that had masked the Army's reported inventory of equipment and property.

In one case, she said, a mismatch between the Army's property-tracking system, Global Combat Support System-Army, and its maintenance-tracking system, the Logistics Modernization Program, created false duplicate records. Personnel manually entering serial numbers for vehicles undergoing maintenance sometimes typed the letter "O" instead of the numeral zero, causing the maintenance system to register what looked like an entirely new piece of equipment rather than an existing one.

The result, she said, was that the Army appeared to have more trucks and other vehicles than it actually owned, an error now being corrected Army-wide.

A second example involved the Army's property records, which are needed to budget for facility upkeep, including maintenance and repair of barracks, hospitals and other installations.

After consolidating property data, officials were able to double-check items like square footage and utility lines, Anderson said. The shift allowed the Army to catch numerous errors that resulted from data entry mistakes with extra zeros that had been missed because no one had cross-checked the data.

Fixing such errors matters, she said, because outdated property data can directly skew how much money a base ultimately receives for repairs or new construction.

'SINGLE PANE OF GLASS'

The new digital dashboard, Army Fiscal Frontline, which Andersen described as a "single pane of glass," gives officials a previously unavailable real-time, transaction-level view of the service's fiscal health.

The Army says it allows everyone - from a unit in the field to Pentagon leaders - to view the same underlying numbers instead of separately tailored or conflicting versions.

Consolidating the data has also allowed officials to see inventory on the books that had already been used, Anderson said. 

Looking ahead, Anderson said the more ambitious goal is to use machine learning to flag recurring data errors — such as the O-versus-zero mistake — before they distort financial records, rather than catching them after the fact.

(Reporting by Mike Stone in Washington; editing by Chris Sanders and Deepa Babington)