Making Haste

By Sebastian Sprenger / October 14, 2009 at 5:00 AM

With the Obama administration recently presiding over its first fiscal year close-out, officials want to make sure work on the FY-09 financial statements goes as quickly as it did in previous years.

The statutory deadline for the paperwork is five months after the fiscal year ends. But during the past four years it took agencies only 45 days to complete the work.

"It is my expectation that federal agencies will continue to meet this accelerated time table, and I hereby request that federal agencies treat 45 days after the end of the fiscal year as a deadline for submitting year-end financial statements," Office of Management and Budget director Peter Orszag wrote in a memo yesterday.

Of course, not all financial statements are equal. The Defense Department -- partly because of its sheer vastness, officials say -- has been trying to get its numbers in order for years.

DOD's latest moves toward clean audits are summarized in the periodically updated Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness Plan. The latest version, from March, said auditors considered 45 percent of DOD's $3.8 trillion in assets and liabilities deserving of a "complete" rating.

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