There's No Accounting for Congress
McFadden, Edward
Edward McFadden There's No Accounting for Congress Especially if the GAO is cooking the numbers. On Capitol Hill, the General Accounting Office has become the legislative-branch franchise of...
...Therefore we didn't include that information in the report...
...A bigger part of the story the GAO conveniently left out relates to the relationship between bounced checks and re-election campaigns...
...It's the sort of attitude that will lead Republicans to squander an election year tailor-made for them...
...This GAO is a tenacious, even vindictive body, known to hound other agencies for years: • In a clear example of partisan retaliation for the bank scandal, the GAO is in the midst of a comprehensive audit—requested by the House leadership—of the perks "abused" by members of the executive branch and the Bush Administration...
...Bowsher refused to withdraw the report, which should come as no surprise: in his ten years of stewardship, a GAO report has never been withdrawn due to errors of fact or incomplete research...
...Christopher Bond (R-Les Aspin turned up $600 toilet seats and forced changes in bidding policies...
...These statistics are important because of the role that the GAO plays in shaping legislation...
...Christopher Cox (R-Cal...
...T he GAO was founded in 1921 to track and report federal expenditures for Congress...
...John Conyers of Government Operations or Dingell for a detail assignment...
...With the GAO, you can get anything you want...
...Only after the Democrats were suitably weakened, he said, would the Republicans come to the negotiating table on such issues as equitable staffing policies and relations with the congressional agencies...
...When the GAO details a staffer to a committee, that auditor technically no longer works for the GAO, even though the salary is paid through the agency...
...Early in his tenure, Bowsher tried to introduce a salary system that would reward quality work, but the plan was blocked and killed by GAO assistant directors...
...He is said to be a major Democratic player who encourages the intimate links between Democratic committee chairmen and the agency...
...The former staffers point to assistant director of human resources Lawrence Thompson as a reason for the close Democratic ties...
...The GAO never bothered to confirm the article's facts...
...The chairman of a committee makes the request to GAO for the assignment, and requires the approval of the committee's ranking minority party member...
...The downriver states, mainly Missouri, wanted the river flow to remain at its normal level...
...It had earlier recommended ending the Apache program and, after its initial report was ignored, continued to investigate, citing congressional interest...
...Annual differentials are more subtle in some years, but still noticeable...
...Some former members continue to maintain active accounts with the Office of the Sergeant-at-Arms...
...More typical are the three congressmen who asked that their names not be used in this article, for fear of Democratic and GAO retribution...
...Bond laments the passing of what was once an unbiased, independent auditing agency...
...remarked, "What the GAO is doing in a war zone, occupying limited military resources that clearly had more pressing requirements, boggles my mind...
...Also ignored is the courtesy notification that a GAO audit has been requested...
...Former GAO employees say one of the reasons the agency has been so easily coopted by congressional Democrats is the 94-percent retention rate of GAO staffers...
...Those subpoenas were issued May 6, but were not made public until May 14 by Foley, who said it was an "oversight" that Republicans were not informed at the time they were issued...
...C leve Corlett, a spokesman for the GAO, is candid enough when he says the relationship between his agency and the Democrats "was bound to happen, given the length of time the committees have been controlled by Democrats...
...After several weeks we were finally able to show that GAO's numbers were off and that they had fudged the numbers, combined some figures, and ended up with this huge price tag," says Rep...
...The overdrafts simply didn't play a large role in what we were reporting...
...yet take the GAO off the congressional beat and watch it become a pit bull of an auditing agency...
...But the GAO didn't pick up on that...
...Christopher Bond (R-Mo...
...that excludes the more than 170 GAO staffers detailed to work for congressional committees at an annual cost of $4 million...
...Again, it is common for GAO auditors to work closely with the requesters to shape reports in a way that is satisfactory and useful to the legislator or committee...
...Republicans on that committee have none...
...John Dingell, the formidable chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has twenty-two detailees at his service...
...The GAO got even with Bond by "randomly" selecting Missouri for an audit on the benefits accruing to states from federal agencies based in them...
...Kent Conrad and Rep...
...The only problem with this audit is that all of the so-called perks available to the executive branch are theoretically examined, audited, and approved by Congress annually through the budget process...
...They don't want to possibly miss out on a juicy report...
...to see that they were...
...But Walker, Domenici, and Bond insist that those situations occur infrequently, mainly because of the abuse of GAO staffing policies that detail employees to committees...
...According to the GAO, Walker was not entitled to make the request because he was not a ranking member of the Government Operations Committee...
...During Operation Desert Storm, two GAO auditors showed up on the front lines to inform Gen...
...Unlike other congressional agencies—the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service—the GAO can make policy recommendations scripted by the audit's requester...
...During years with no reelection campaign, the accounts receivable decrease...
...In the past two years, the GAO, led by Comptroller General Charles Bowsher, whom President Ronald Reagan appointed to a 15-year term in 1982, has performed more than 1,900 audits and investigative reports and testified more than 500 times before Congress...
...The GAO has completed its own report on congressional flights, but Democrats are holding up its release...
...In the past ten years, the General Accounting Office has entered into a very comfortable arrangement with Democrats in Congress...
...Over sixty accounts showed overdrafts during the period of audit...
...The report has since been discredited by a series of reports from a GAO detailee to the House Committee on the Budget, which showed huge tax increases would result, but both Democratic presidential candidates continue to support the GAO model...
...28 The American Spectator July 1992...
...The request was denied by the House leadership...
...With the establishment of the Congressional Budget Office, the GAO's beat became sniffing out waste and fraud within the executive branch and—theoreticallyCongress...
...When he had occasion to deal with the GAO himself, he was told to take a hike...
...More recently, the GAO audit of the Canadian health care system—requested by House Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski—has become the basis of a number of reform schemes...
...Going back as far as 1952, when the GAO began auditing the bank operated out of the Sergeant-at-Arms office, these audits reveal that the GAO and the office of the Speaker of the House have long been aware of check-kiting and overdrafts...
...Norman Schwarzkopf that they wanted to observe the Apache helicopter under wartime conditions...
...Pete Domenici remarked, "What the GAO is doing in a war zone, occupying limited military resources that clearly had more pressing requirements, boggles my mind...
...Walker says he saw many GAO reports and audits that were incomplete, misleading, and prepared through a "group-participation process" that included only Democratic legislators and staffers...
...Working, ironically, with a GAO detailee, committee staffers began examining the bank in 1989 after Foley and the GAO refused to provide the committee with full audits of the bank...
...After Bond's office released a 45-page report on the inaccuracies of the audit, the GAO admitted the report was incomplete but insisted that "our report is consistent with GAO's responsibilities...
...Unlike other congressional agencies—the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service—the GAO can make policy recommendations scripted by the audit's requester...
...More importantly, a large number of those checks are believed to have been made out for cash...
...Only after staff discovered the seriousness of the bank problem did the GAO catch on that a more illuminating audit might have to be performed...
...Walker says that the GAO can still perform top-notch work when both parties are allowed to participate—as, for example, in the cooperation shown by the GAO detailee in the House Administration Committee's look into the House Bank...
...Not the kind of numbers one normally writes out to pay off a grocer's bill...
...T he GAO was founded in 1921 to track and report federal expenditures for Congress...
...It's almost a game to them to see which one can snap up the GAOer first," said a committee staffer...
...If a report does not meet with requester approval, it is never publicly released, even if the information is in the public's or Congress's interest...
...is even more pointed...
...Maybe the picture fit twenty or thirty years ago, but no more...
...that excludes the more than 170 GAO staffers detailed to work for congressional committees at an annual cost of $4 million...
...Last year, Republicans requested a three-percent increase in their overall committee staff...
...With the scandal's spotlight currently on special prosecutor Judge Malcolm Wilkey, the GAO has managed to avoid scrutiny...
...An unscientific poll of committees with GAO detailees showed that fewer than five of the Democrat-requested GAO personnel were signed off by Republican members of the committee—in other words, the policy is ignored...
...Already, federal prosecutors have caught on to this scam, and have subpoenaed the office records of Ways and Means chairman Rostenkowski and two Democratic congressmen from Pennsylvania...
...Wilkey's The American Spectator July 1992 25 staff is believed to have all that documentation now...
...It is now a $488-million, 5,000-employee bureaucracy with sixteen regional offices across the country and overseas...
...The GAO doesn't give us anything a good accounting firm in the private sector couldn't give us for less," he says...
...Press accounts present the agency as a nonpartisan, vigilant office full of men and women with green eyeshades poring over budgets and expense accounts for waste or fraud and answering to no one...
...Kite totals increased steadily until 1977—when GAO audits became public...
...And if you don't know what the recipe is, they will make that up for you too...
...Cox, the ranking Republican on Government Operations, says he often finds out about GAO reports only on the day they are released to committees...
...On Capitol Hill, the General Accounting Office has become the legislative-branch franchise of Alice's Restaurant...
...T hat isn't what the special prosecutor thinks...
...The audit also revealed that some congressmen left blank, signed checks with the bank so that staff could fill in the amounts in case of overdrafts...
...If a committee chairman doesn't approach the GAO with the idea, the GAO staffers know that they can approach the chair just as easily...
...In every audit from 1952 on, the GAO staffers would pointedly reveal the continuing overdraft problem...
...According to Sen...
...Robert Walker (R–Penn...
...Unfortunately, Gingrich has not addressed the GAO problem, and it's been up to Republicans like Bond, Cox, Domenici, and Walker to keep the issue alive...
...I had solid evidence and information leading me to believe that 75 percent of Congress was not following its own drug-free policy guidelines, and GAO refused the audit," he says...
...It's a theme that insurgent Republicans like House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich have been playing up for years now...
...It is now a $488-million, 5,000-employee bureaucracy with sixteen regional offices across the country and overseas...
...Again, nothing wrong was detected with the helicopters...
...4 4 he relationship between GAO and Democratic leaders has gotten so that the agency will tailormake the audit to the requester's liking," said a Republican congressman...
...The Miami Herald, in its investigation of Smith, alleged that he funneled campaign funds through his House bank account...
...Until then, audits had been submitted confidentially to the Speaker of the House...
...And whereas twenty years ago 80 percent of GAO's audits were performed independent of congressional request or assistance, in 1991 more than 80 percent of those audits and testimonies were requested by congressional committee chairmen and 90 percent of those came through the Democratic majority...
...What we're talking about here is part of a shadow executive branch...
...Maybe the picture fit twenty or thirty years ago, but no more...
...Former GAO staffers say Bowsher simply couldn't deal with the permanent bureaucratic establishment of the GAO...
...On Capitol Hill, the General Accounting Office has become the legislative-branch franchise of Alice's Restaurant...
...But an investigation by Christopher Bond's office revealed that the GAO had based its analysis and recommendations on a law review article written and provided to the GAO by South Dakota Assistant Attorney General John Guhin, a Democrat...
...For instance, audits of the Pentagon done for Armed Services chairman 24 The American Spectator July 1992 Edward McFadden There's No Accounting for Congress Especially if the GAO is cooking the numbers...
...One House source says, "There were a lot of checks written in very round numbers—$1,000, $3,000, or $5,000...
...That information was edited out of the report...
...In many ways, the GAO has become the largest and most influential disinformation outlet for Democrats in Washington, covering up serious problems such as the recent House Bank scandal...
...The ability to block a report's issuance is one of the perks GAO provides requesters...
...Rep...
...In accepting Guhin's article, GAO refused to accept written comments from the Corps of Engineers, and did not consider a widely accepted research paper on the drought's effects on the river issued by the University of Missouri, nor did it interview the appropriate government officials in the downriver states...
...Rep...
...But when Walker asked if the House Minority Leader could request the audit, the GAO replied that only the Speaker of the House could make such a request...
...Bond laments the passing of what was once an unbiased, independent auditing agency...
...Personal vice on the part of elected officials is not necessarily the purview of the GAO, although it would have been difficult to miss...
...The fact that that information will come out has a lot of people nervous around here because you have to wonder why someone would want that kind of money hanging around a House office...
...After working there for twenty years, it is easy to become a drone for congressional work orders...
...These statistics are important because of the role that the GAO plays in shaping legislation...
...Clark said that the GAO auditors would not have looked into these allegations because it was not part of the procedure the GAO followed in auditing the bank, and said his agency was simply fulfilling the audit request put forth bythe Speaker's office...
...At least one congressman, Larry Smith (D-Florida), has announced his retirement from the House, evidently because of checks written to cover gambling debts, among other reasons...
...Sergeant-at-Arms Jack Russ, who was bouncing large numbers of checks, informed the GAO and Foley that changes would be instituted to prevent further overdrafts...
...A congressional watchdog has become a Democratic lapdog...
...David Clark, the GAO staffer who oversaw the most recent audits, said that the year the reports became public, "we went to a new reporting format that eliminated a lot of the information that did not pertain to the bank's financial statement...
...NASA officials did see portions of the report—for either Boxer or the GAO leaked a copy to the Washington Post, which ran it as a page-one story the morning of the hearing...
...GAO auditors hot to investigate a certain subject regularly shop their ideas to either Rep...
...One such audit was performed for Dingell...
...a member of the House Government Operations Committee in the mid-1980s who has since resigned from it...
...The GAO doesn't give us anything a good accounting firm in the private sector couldn't give us for less," he says...
...Byron Dorgan jointly requested a GAO investigation into a drought's effect on the Missouri River basin...
...CI Sen...
...The GAO had an axe to grind...
...The ethics committee had all the draft work [for the 1991 audit] performed by GAO on the bank and the draft reports detailed a great deal more than any report that has been issued thus far...
...interest-free loans for re-election campaigns...
...Christopher Cox (R-Cal...
...under a note labeled "Accounts Receivable From Members," the text read: Amounts due from Members represent checks drawn on and cashed or paid by the Sergeant at Arms but not charged to Member's accounts...
...When the two auditors found nothing amiss during their initial meeting with Schwarzkopf, they showed up again two days later, saying they had been "misled" on their first visit...
...Perhaps, but there is a simpler explanation, confirmed in interviews with legislators and staffers (but denied by a GAO spokesman)—GAO auditors were asked by Democratic House leaders to remove the documentation in a made-to-order audit...
...You give Congress what it wants, because you would never dream of biting the hand that feeds you...
...Pete Domenici (R-N.M...
...Edward McFadden is a reporter in Washington, D.C...
...In the past ten years, the General Accounting Office has entered into a very comfortable arrangement with Democrats in Congress...
...On Capitol Hill, that's one thing you can still bank on...
...Nowhere has the GAO been more twisted and obfuscatory than in its investigation of the House Bank scandal in which it has hidden from public view a tradition of check-kiting, overdrafts, campaign-finance money-laundering, and possible illegal gambling and In 1961, the GAO began to cite explicit numbers—$610,000 on 5,221 worthless checks—and reported that half the members had overdrafts, many of them going unpaid for a month or more...
...the Miami Herald did...
...GAO simply couldn't withhold it unless it was told to...
...Now, the language and detailed information about the check-kiting mysteriously changed...
...But let us not forget that most Republicans in Congress are not insurgents...
...Nor did the GAO check "The GAO doesn't give us anything a good accounting firm in the private sector couldn't give us for less," Rep...
...Even though the GAO has a fully staffed outpost in Germany, detailees approached Dingell with an idea to examine the Securities and Exchange Commission's International Cooperative Agreements, and off they went on a free tour of European capitals...
...The American Spectator July 1992 27 The report stated that NASA had grossly underestimated the cost of building a space station, and NASA had no way of preparing a rebuttal...
...Christopher Cox says...
...It wasn't until the late-1989 audit—in which Speaker of the House Tom Foley claims he first "learned" of the overdraft problem and acted "within minutes"—that the GAO finally teed off on the House Bank and called for changes...
...What we're talking about here is part of a shadow executive branch...
...A day later, the House Post Office would buy back the stamps for cash, which would then be deposited in the House Bank...
...But many of the answers to the special prosecutor's questions may lie in the thirty or so GAO audits of the House Bank obtained for this article...
...As the chart on page 27 shows, the GAO ignored a mysterious rise in check-bouncing levels each campaign season...
...At the time, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana were suing the U.S...
...Clark agreed that the differentials stood out, and said that auditors had noticed them, but "there really was nothing to it...
...And whereas twenty years ago 80 percent of GAO's audits were performed independent of congressional request or assistance, in 1991 more than 80 percent of those audits and testimonies were requested by congressional committee chairmen and 90 percent of those came through the Democratic majority...
...A longtime governmentcomptroller and senior member of the Arthur Anderson accounting firm, Bowsher had gained Ronald Reagan's attention in 1979 as a major fund-raiser for the Reagan presidential campaign...
...What we're talking about here is part of a shadow executive branch...
...For instance, audits of the Pentagon done for Armed Services chairman 24 The American Spectator July 1992 Edward McFadden There's No Accounting for Congress Especially if the GAO is cooking the numbers...
...The credit for bringing these scams to light belongs to the staff of the House Administration Committee, which is supposed to oversee the Sergeant-at-Arms...
...Bond sees Bowsher as part of the problem, a far cry from 1982, when Republicans thought he would be an ally in leveling the GAO playing field...
...Democrats are hoping to have the report ready prior to the report issued by the special prosecutor in the House Bank scandal...
...Once you begin your career there, you never leave," said a disenchanted former employee...
...The Sergeant at Arms monitors all such items daily, and no financial losses have occurred under these procedures...
...Another congressman says the GAO uncovered evidence of a numbers racket being run out of the Sergeant-at-Arms office...
...In many ways, the GAO has become the largest and most influential disinformation outlet for Democrats in Washington, covering up serious problems such as the recent House Bank scandal...
...With the establishment of the Congressional Budget Office, the GAO's beat became sniffing out waste and fraud within the executive branch and—theoreticallyCongress...
...The fast-fact joint known as the GAO, it's safe to say, will remain Democrat-owned and operated for many years to come...
...A congressional watchdog has become a Democratic lapdog...
...The upriver states wanted the Corps to allow less water to flow out their reservoirs so that the states' boating and recreation businesses would flourish...
...In 1958, the auditor said, "Aside from the doubtful legality of accepting overdraft items and holding them for rather lengthy periods of time, the accounting control over the items is not adequate...
...The Defense Department has compiled detailed documentary evidence showing how seriously Congress abused its own privileges regarding the use of military jets...
...But by then, it was too late, the damage was done...
...NASA officials assisted the auditors in preparing the report, but when NASA asked to receive a copy of the final product prior to the hearings of the House Science and Technology Committee, GAO refused, saying Boxer would not allow it...
...According to Sen...
...Edward McFadden is a reporter in Washington, D.C...
...There is mounting evidence in the hands of Wilkey that there was an intricate campaign fund–laundering technique practiced through the House Bank and House Post Office...
...A check made out to a re-election campaign would be cashed for stamps at the House Post Office...
...In 1989, North Dakota Democrats Sen...
...On the House Government Operations Committee, the Democratic staff is eighty-two members strong, comparedto seventeen for Republicans...
...Of the 127 current GAO detailees—on average there are 172 annually—not one has been provided to Republican committee members or staff and only one detailee was approved for the Republicans...
...Democrats may think they can win the perk war by using the GAO, but they had better tread lightly...
...In a round of tough talk after the bank scandal broke earlier this year, Gingrich said his side of the aisle would just "sit back and wait for the political fallout to occur...
...Both men jump at the idea...
...is even more pointed...
...Funding for the space station remains inadequate, and NASA says the project is no longer taken seriously...
...Most of these people have never held a job outside the GAO, and have no experiences other than GAO to relate their work to...
...And if you don't know what the recipe is, they will make that up for you too...
...In addition, the committee has twenty-six GAO detailees, who work for the Democrats exclusively...
...All of that information was cut by the GAO at the request of the House leadership prior to the audit's release...
...Quite a change from the "questionable legality" language of twenty years before...
...In the past two years, the GAO, led by Comptroller General Charles Bowsher, whom President Ronald Reagan appointed to a 15-year term in 1982, has performed more than 1,900 audits and investigative reports and testified more than 500 times before Congress...
...Take the audit for the period January 4–July 3, 1952: It was noted that some Members still consistently overdraw their accounts, sometimes in excess of their monthly salary and expense allowances, while others make periodic overdrafts...
...A House staffer who has been monitoring the investigation says that it is now focusing on the theory that the bank became a means of providing interest-free loans for reelection campaigns, and a depository for cash deposits of large campaign donations...
...The GAO's auditing of the bank had slipped so badly that in 1988, for instance, there was no mention whatsoever of a check-bouncing problem...
...According to Sen...
...The offices of House Minority Leader Robert Michel and three different senators have been trying for months to get copies of any GAO working papers and reports on the House Bank and have been denied access...
...With the GAO, you can get anything you want...
...Under pressure from Bond's office, the GAO acknowledged its source for the report was the article...
...The GAO found in favor of the 26 The American Spectator July 1992 upstream states and the report's finding was trumpeted by North Dakota as proof its lawsuit had merit...
...The numbers could have meant anything...
...Christopher Bond (R-Mo...
...On Capitol Hill, the General Accounting Office has become the legislative-branch franchise of Alice's Restaurant...
...In the annual audits of fiscal years leading up to re-election in November, the accounts receivable from members increase...
...In May 1991, the GAO performed an audit of a NASA space station proposal for Barbara Boxer (D–Cal...
...Press accounts present the agency as a nonpartisan, vigilant office full of men and women with green eyeshades poring over budgets and expense accounts for waste or fraud and answering to no one...
...Those policies were never enacted...
...Army Corps of Engineers over who controlled the flow and level of the river...
Vol. 25 • July 1992 • No. 7
