Solari Action Network

[Catherine]

http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?click_id=31&art_id=qw108460549016B212&set_id=1

Auditor quits with Nasa finances in chaos

May 15 2004 at 09:18AM

By Arindam Nag and Deborah Zabarenko

New York - As Nasa sets course for the moon and Mars, the space agency's finances are in disarray, with significant errors in its last financial statements and inadequate documentation for $565-billion posted to its accounts, its former auditor reported.

Nasa's chief for internal financial management said the problem stemmed from a rough transition from 10 different internal accounting programs to a new integrated one, but audit firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers noted basic accounting errors and a breakdown in Nasa's financial controls.

PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Nasa parted ways earlier this year, according to the space agency's inspector general, Robert Cobb. PriceWaterhouseCoopers declined to comment, but a source familiar with the situation said the audit firm opted out of the contract because it was unhappy with the relationship.

In a scathing report on Nasa's September 30, 2003, financial statement - which got scant attention at its release but was detailed in a cover story in the May issue of CFO Magazine - the audit firm accused the space agency of one of the cardinal sins of the accounting world: failing to record its own costs properly.

The same report said the transition to the new accounting program triggered a series of blunders that made completing the Nasa audit impossible.

There were hundreds of millions of dollars of "unreconciled" funds and a $2-billion difference between what Nasa said it had and what was actually in its accounts, which are held by the Treasury Department, PriceWaterhouseCoopers said in its 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 January 20 report to Cobb, Nasa's inspector general. It also noted "significant errors" in financial statements provided by Nasa.

That big number - $565-billion, with a "B" - was the result of posting problems, new software and a "massive cleanup" of 12 years of Nasa's financial records, said Patrick Ciganer, Nasa's chief for integrated financial management.

Under the new system, Ciganer said in a telephone interview, errors that were discovered in the transition could show up multiple times in the accounting process: once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in the correct column. By this reckoning, a $40-billion contract that stretched over nine years and several separate Nasa centres generated $120-billion worth of entries, and these were turned over to the auditors.

"They have weak controls and problems with their internal system and that would make them vulnerable to (financial) fraud, although we don't have that evidence yet," said Gregory Kutz, a director in the General Accounting Office, which is looking into Nasa's accounting issues. A Senate hearing on the issue was set for Wednesday.

With a current annual budget of $16,2-billion, Nasa's priorities include an ambitious multi-year mission to the moon and possibly Mars, finishing construction on the International Space Station and returning the grounded shuttle fleet to flight after the 2003 Columbia disaster.

The independent investigation of the Columbia accident, in which seven astronauts died, found NASA's culture at fault. The same spirit that fuelled the early boom in space exploration in the 1950s evolved into separate parts of a sprawling agency working independently rather than co-operatively.

The same independent path extends to Nasa's financial accounting, Cobb said.

"You've got an environment at the agency where there are these 10 centres which pride themselves on their independence... and it becomes very difficult in connection with any of Nasa's functional management responsibilities to have people kowtow to the folks at (Nasa) headquarters who have the responsibility to pull it all together," Cobb said.

Cinager said he was hopeful that Nasa's culture would change, noting a new "willingness of all of the constituencies in the agency to introspectively look at how can they improve the way they are doing their specific duties."

But Shyam Sundar, a professor in accounting with Yale School of Management, described the event as "a big mess", after seeing the auditor's report.

"If Nasa would have been a public company, the management would have been fired by now," he said.

[Catherine]

http://www.cfo.com/article/1,5309,13502,00.html?f=home_magazine

Nasa, we have a problem

[jfkap14]

Will the Bormann Group please call home?

There are only GOOD Nazis working at NASA. Remember, the BAD Nazis went to Argentina and Paraguay. (and maybe Langley.)

[Guest]

when I saw this, as benjyfrank, my slashdot nym.

http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=107662&threshold=1&commentsort=0&tid=103&tid=134&tid=160&tid=98&tid=99&mode=thread&pid=9159806#9160545

Unfortunately, my post did not get modded up enough to show conspicuously on the main postings, but oh well better luck next time...

Thomas.

[Catherine]

Thomas:

Get

Blank Check by Tim Wiener

You can pick it up on the used section of Amazon for a low price.

It is the best book on the black budget I have found so far. I think you will enjoy it and find it very useful.

Lots of love,

Catherine

[jfkap14]

For those who don't know who Martin Bormann was, here is the crash course. He was Hitler's real finance minister. He moved the Third Reich's cash to safe havens. He did not die in Berlin at the end of the war. He made it to Paraguay thanks to the Vatican Ratlines. And Hitler lived well in Argentina, also.

So, you wonder where the money went? Es macht nichts! Wir haben die Finanzkrieg gewonnen! [It doesn't matter. We won the money war.]

http://www.themedianews.com/DAGGER/Head_Lines/Link%20Extras/nazi_connection_to_the_john_f.htm

[SusanJ]

Documents Show U.S. Relationship With Nazis During Cold War
By ELIZABETH OLSON

Published: May 14, 2004

ASHINGTON, May 13 - The American government worked closely with Nazi war criminals and collaborators, allowing many of them to live in the United States after World War II, and paying others who worked for West Germany's secret service, according to declassified documents from the F.B.I., C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies released Thursday.
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The disclosures came as part of a project to place more than eight million government documents in the public domain, under legislation passed by Congress in 1998 to create the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group, or I.W.G.

"Although we have long known the outlines of the U.S. government's covert dealings with Nazi war criminals, the full scope of these relationships has never been fully documented or revealed," said Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the working group and a former congresswoman from New York. "Until the work of the I.W.G., these relationships remained one of the great post-World War II secrets."

The 240,000 pages released Thursday reveal a pattern of American cooperation with questionable people who were protected on the grounds that they had valuable intelligence to offer during the cold-war period.

It was not that such collaborators fell through the bureaucratic cracks and were overlooked by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said Norman J. W. Goda, an Ohio University history professor whose examination of the material is included in the book, "U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis," that the working group released Thursday.

"We had assumed that the I.N.S. dropped the ball, making only perfunctory background checks on these people," Mr. Goda said. "But the records show that immigration officials did investigate and tried to have these people deported."

"The problem," he said, "was that there were preferences in the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.," particularly of J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director, "to keep these people in the country so they could report on any Communist trends inside their own community."

Ultimately, Mr. Goda concluded, "such men added nothing except grist for the mill for their own propaganda."

Mr. Goda and other historians who studied the documents said that at least five associates of the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, each of whom had a significant role in Hitler's campaign to kill Jews, had worked for the C.I.A. The records also indicate that the C.I.A. tried to recruit another two dozen war criminals or Nazi collaborators. Some of them received employment and, in two cases, United States citizenship, according to the documents. The documents did not deal with those people who concealed their Nazi pasts in order to gain entry into the United States.

Also, several dozen people with criminal or dubious backgrounds were paid by the United States while they were employed by West Germany's secret service.

Timothy J. Naftali, an intelligence historian at the University of Virginia who examined the documents and also wrote chapters in the I.W.G. book, said: "We had no policies for helping Gestapo members, no disqualifiers unless the public knew about the crimes. It was kind of a 'don't ask, don't tell' culture."

The Interagency Working Group's mandate to examine declassified intelligence documents has been extended by one year, and its staff members said there would be a report in 2005 about activities in Asia and a final report later to summarize the group's findings.