
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, August 19, 1993                   TAG: 9308190213
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Washington Post
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

IRS CAN'T BALANCE ITS BOOKS

The Internal Revenue Service, which has made many an American anxious over an audit, recently underwent a comprehensive audit of its own - its first. Among the findings:

A video display terminal costing $752 was valued in IRS inventory records at $5.6 million.

The agancy paid $36,000 for a maintenance contract for a minicomputer that had been idle for three years.

Duplicate payments and overpayments worth $500,000 were found in a review of 280 payments to vendors, and 112 payments totaling $17.2 million lacked complete supporting documentation.

The IRS examples are but a small slice of one of the federal government's most serious problems: financial books that are out of whack, perhaps by tens of billions of dollars.

Unlike America's major companies or even the keeper of the family checkbook, most federal agencies have trouble tracking where money is being spent and cannot produce error-free financial statements, according to the General Accounting Office.

Previous GAO audits found more than $200 billion in accounting errors by the Army and Air Force, more than $500 million worth of errors in NASA financial statements, and record-keeping troubles at the State Department and Department of Veterans Affairs.

Sen. William Roth of Delaware, a member of Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said, "It never fails to amaze me. If private industry kept its accounts like we do in government, they'd be in jail."

by CNB