We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.   Edward R. Murrow 

The NAWBC is dedicated to exposing a twenty-year failed outsourcing initiative that includes our government’s Central Agencies [Government Accountability Office (GAO), Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Treasury Department, and General Services Administration (GSA)].  This government-wide failure involves the outsourcing of untested off-the-shelf financial software that is still used by each of our government’s 24 CFO Act agencies.  To waste even more tax dollars, OMB Circular A-123 mandates that management consulting firms recommend fixes to address the technical deficiencies reported by government accountants. 

GAO confirmed the magnitude of this government-wide accountability failure, and inability to generate accurate financial statements at any level, in each of the last ten consecutive years of its own written Congressional testimony.  In GAO’s July 2007 Financial Audit and Congressional report, David Walker, the former Comptroller General of the U.S., identified additional actions to address this 20 year unacknowledged failure.   As taxpayers, we can either listen to GAO’s and the Central Agencies litany of excuses or we can demand the changes needed to address the deficiencies that created this gross waste, fraud, and abuse of our tax dollars and the resulting internal threat to our financial security.

If there was ever a case against outsourcing and the quote “savings” derived from that effort, this is it.  Consider that this government-wide outsourcing failure began in October 1987 when our government’s top Central Agencies’ bureaucrats, complete with no educations in either accounting or computer science (CS) committed the Federal government to procuring untested off-the-shelf financial software.  All top Central Agency bureaucrats were made aware that, because we had no government-wide accounting standard based on generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), there was no ability to test any of the available off-the-shelf financial software; all financial statements would still have to be prepared manually, as in the past.  Despite this knowledge, the Central Agencies still made this software available to all 24 CFO Act agencies.  In effect, there were no tax payer savings and no benefit derived from procuring this off-the-shelf financial software.

In October 1990, the Central Agencies formed the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) and outsourced the design of the federal government’s accounting standards to American Institute of Certified Public Accountant (AICPA) firms.  Seventeen-years later, our government still has no GAAP-based government-wide accounting standard and, according to GAO’s own written testimony, no ability to generate either the 24 CFO Act agency's financial statements or our government’s Consolidated Financial Statements (CFS).  As you may or may not know, this is a basic requirement of all corporations and the driving force in Congress’s passage of the private-sector version of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002.

The NAWBC is dedicated to helping Congress and the American people understand why our government’s accounting and financial systems are wasteful, inefficient, and incapable of generating meaningful financial statements, at any level. A fundamental problem is that the Central Agencies' and 24 CFO Act Agency's  financial managers are political appointees who lack the most basic technical accounting and CS educations and credentials to do their jobs.  These revolving door bureaucrats (RDB's), in turn, routinely promote and hire more GM level "technically unqualified" managers who, together, blindly accept the Central Agencies' outsourced private sector accounting and CS standards as "the gospel."  All credentialed government accountants and CS professionals who question these untested standards are, then, systematically eliminated.  The significance of these standards is that they are used by all Federal agencies.   

The NAWBC is equally committed to helping Congress and the American people understand that the fixes to our Central Agencies', 24 CFO Act agencies', and the Departments of Defense's accounting and financial system deficiencies are nothing more than an application of basic accounting and CS 101 concepts. However, like the private sector, we must understand that our government's accounting and financial system standards, policies, procedures, and processes are equally complex.  Like the private sector, the government needs minimal 4-year college degreed accountant (and CS) requirements at the entry-level, mid-level, and top management levels to ensure the integrity of the data entered and generated, i.e. financial statements.  What we do not need are the deficiencies that result from paying six-figure salaries to the government’s "version" of an accountant (and CS) bureaucrat. 

The very last button to the left is labeled Documentation because it includes the hard copy documentation supporting the comments made regarding the planned and inbred deficiencies cause by the political appointees at the Central Agency and each of the 24 CFO Act agencies.  A single representative CFO Act agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, illustrates how political appointee’s reward, with our tax dollars, their GM management-level staff for covering up all illegal and questionable acts to Congress and the American people. This Documentation Section includes excerpts from GAO's own written Congressional testimony, a letter to the former Comptroller General of the U.S. questioning the Federal government’s accounting standard, a Washington Times OP-ED questioning our government's accounting and financial software standards, letter to Senator Fred Thompson expressing concern with our government’s accounting and financial system standards, specific incidents involving questionable and illegal behavior on the part of other government's top and mid-level managers, and emails to the EPA CFO and mid-level managers questioning EPA’s policy of: 1) placing non 4-year degreed accountants in GM management-level accountant positions, 2) future procurement of an 84 million dollar financial software package, and 3) the waste involved in hiring a management consulting firm to address the very deficiencies that EPA’s management created, ignored, and then intentionally lied to Congress about over the past eleven years concerning deficiencies that were reported by government accountants.

The central theme of the Documentation Section is to make Congress and the American people aware of these planned and inbred government accountability deficiencies.  Next, we must identify the checks and balances to both address these weaknesses and also prevent them from occurring in the future.  It is important to understand that the reason(s) for our government’s failure to generate corporate quality and style financial statements are not technical accounting or financial software issues.  All planned and inbred deficiencies are caused by our RDB and corporate-driven government bureaucracy that are identified in this website.  These failures can be addressed, and in the short term, if Congress is truly interested in providing the same level of government accountability as they did with the private sector, with the passage of a government version of the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002.