NASA's Finances in Disarray

mwolff writes "Yahoo News has an article about the 'financial disarray' NASA seems to be in after a recent audit showed horrible documentation of funding. '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.'"

Comments

Re:this isn't suprising

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect from all the gross mispending of our tax money on shit like space elevators that hardly ever come to fruit? Sorry that this is somewhat a troll, but dammit, it really irks me.

These are just electronic accounting anomolies because of NASA's new Integrated Financial Management system (which has the huge task of combining 10 completely different systems at the field centers into one agency-wide system for accounting). Everyone I know pretty much concludes it's a complete fuckup of a system and whoever designed it should be shot, however, in NASA's defense, this of course does NOT mean they overspent $565 billion. NASA's budget was around $15 billion this year so you can easily imagine that overspending by $550 billion is impossible. It's all accounting oddities, not actual monetary loss. Think of it as a learning curve.. NASA operates as 10+ distinct field centers that honestly have nothing in common except the name of the agency. They all fight for program dollars, all have their own management structure with their own agendas, and all fight to try to steal programs from other centers. It's really pathetic when you think about it. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama is just about the worst when it comes to stealing programs from other centers IMHO. Oh yea, BTW, IFM is handled out of MSFC. It figures a bunch of backwoods hicks living in the asshole of America (Alabama) couldn't add and subtract numbers correctly. They get lost after they count to 20 and exhaust the number of fingers and toes they have so it's understandable that figures like $2 billion here or $3 billion there would utterly confound them.

Re:this isn't suprising

[Moofie]

Serious possibility?

Do you have the vaguest notion what building a space elevator would entail? It's a GREAT idea. And when we have autonomous factories that can turn asteroids into carbon nanotubes, it's going to be the only way to fly.

But, for now, with our current level of technology, it is a non-starter.

Re:I can already hear the excuses

[Frymaster]

NASA: "The 360 ate our paper tape"

don't laugh. the computer that nasa used for the moon landing had 74k of rom, only 4k of ram and no external storage whatsoever. despite that it ran a real, interrupt-driven, multi-user operating system and, most importantly, it go the job done.

my source is here.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Undefined Parameter]

Calm down, there, pal. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but from what I know, the US unemployment rate is holding short of 6% as of April. The unemployment rate of the Great Depression was about 25%. So in terms of real unemployment, we're doing about four times better than we were back in the 1930s.

Yes, the recession is bad, and on-going; I'm not going to make apologies for the current President because I, myself, don't like him. But, as a student training in history, I felt that I had to correct that one (run-on) sentence of your short but panicked post.

I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I do advise that you at least take a few deep breaths.

~UP

Re:How do we get $565 billion with a small budget?

[gclef]

From the article:

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 centers generated $120 billion worth of entries, and these were turned over to the auditors.

Basically, it's not that they lost 500 billion, it's that the total number of accounting errors totals 500 billion...I think this is a silly way of counting errors, as it grossly inflates the size of the problem by automatically tripling the size of a problem for every mis-classified entry.

Honestly, this looks like headline-grabbing by their auditors. (Who, it should be noted, lost the NASA contract to keep doing their auditing.)