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

Here's the solution

[nate nice]

Simply outsource the work to cheaper markets. I've heard China has really good aerospace engineers and programmers that will work at disproportional wages for the products market.

-How long till this is modded -1 Troll?

URL IS BAD! MOD PARENT DOWN!

[Three Headed Man]

It's for shitfaced lady and some other nasty offensive things.

So this won't be an entire waste of a post, the NASA stuff isn't surprising--my grandpa worked for NASA way back when, and the attitude was, "If we can get it in the, good. If we can get it in the air and make it stay within budget, they'll give us less money next time." This isn't an environment conducive to good bookkeeping.

Re:Perhaps militarization is the solution

[voideng]

Where to begin, your first proposal would require any country that wished to launch any kind of space craft to get permission from almost every country and a few rouge nations as well. To orbit anything in a non-meridian or non-geosynchronous would require treaties on the scale of the UN charter. Currently there are only 3 countries able to provide manned space flight and about a dozen launching satellites. If your proposal went into effect, Brazil would be the only country that would be able to get the paperwork done to launch anything. There is a treaty stating that the Moon does not belong to any country. It sounds like you're a US basher; at least everything you have recommended would be detrimental to the US and its allies. Also the US is not a colony because we revolted and kicked the British out, the rest we bought from France because they were busy loosing some war or another. Personally I wish we would start colonizing space, but that takes money, technology and resources we currently do not have. At the moment each of the space faring countries and respective consortiums are working together fairly well. Most of the groups have their space projects for the next 20 year fairly well planned out with minimal over lap, and where there is over lap, it seems to be for the higher risk projects. On a political note, we don't care what you think. The President of the United States is the business of the United States, if you don't like it petitions your government to end diplomatic relations with the United States (if you are allowed to do that in your country).

Put the general ledger on the web

[Animats]

The GAO should make NASA put their general ledger on the web. Their summary data is so obfusicated that it doesn't make any sense, but the transaction list of payments might be subject to analysis.

compared to?

[mabu]

NASA's finances in disarray? Compared to whom?

Why is ./ spewing this propaganda? Find me one company employing more than 10 people that doesn't have questionable books. You can't.

faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

I'm glad BushCo applied sound Republican fiscal policy to our preeminent government research program. Wait, they're the guys who quadrupled the government under Reagan, creating more debt than the previous 200+ years combined, topped even that under Bush Sr., sending us (and the world) into a recession larger in real terms than even the Great Depression, and under Bush Jr. turned the biggest surplus in world history into the biggest debt ever imagined (maybe bigger even than that) - which we'll be paying off for the rest of our lives, if we can even muster that through the wreckage of our economy. My TiVo must have gotten stuck on FoxNews 2000.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

Why not call the bigger layoffs worse under Bush Jr than in the 1930s? They're worse. So is practically every other measure. It's worse.

Everyone has an excuse they stopped taking risks and creating wealth starting around 2000. And the same (minority, but huge) gang of pooped Americans invited Bush Jr to manage the economy they were abandoning. And their boy is such a mismanager that even the resilience and vast wealth (and its production system) created under Clinton weren't enough to keep the spiral from descending ever downward. As the hype machine receeded from the real gains, Clinton/Gore's team was busy juggling the "soft landing" you read about in the papers. They would likely have pulled it off, too, if the elected Gore weren't robbed of his inauguration - judging from their deft handling of so many other macroeconomic opportunities and crises.

You can blame us for pissing off bin Laden. More to blame is Bush (apparently deliberately) letting down our defenses to allow bin Laden to do enough damage on TV to "justify" invading Iraq (not actually connected to the planebombings).

The IT "crowd" was doing great work through the bubble. If that crowd includes the fake marketers riding the waves and expense accounts, the pipsqueak managers hiring highschool typers as programmers, child stock analysts selling stocks without any regard to their actual possible value, and crooked accountants on the take, then sure, IT was as responsible for the pop as for the bubble. But those sleazebags are managers, not technologists. And if you look at where they spent their votes in 2000, I'd bet that the techs went largely for Gore, while the culprits went overwhelmingly for Bush. Whether out of guilt, sympathy for a lying freeloader, or just another rotten decision doesn't matter. They got more of their favorite executive decision: "squander".

Bush Jr. is the worst president we can remember anything about. I don't "blame everything" on him. I just decide what needs to be changed to fix his disasters. He's worse than John Kerry, who will likely win the election this year, unless Bush Jr whips up an "October Surprise" witches brew from his grisly bag of terrorist attack, power outage, assassination attempt, Asian nuclear crisis, or any other handy screwup he's enabling, to peak just in time to screw with the election - or cancel it entirely. You might feel guilty about getting paid more than you're worth in the 1990s. But don't take that out on the rest of us. I did a great job in the 1990s, I got paid almost adequately for it, and I'm continuing my quality work by promoting a White House upgrade ASAP.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Doc Ruby]

Deficit as % of GDP does not reflect the problem with the Republican financial disasters that stretch through our lifetimes. The first clue is the "D" in "GDP". American productivity has increasingly globalized, such that under Reagan government economists changed the measures from gross "national" product to "domestic". But (ironically) includes money gained from overseas production and even consumption, which transfers costs borne by governments out of the expenses accounting. Those foreign expenses are typically larger per revenue dollar, as they're typically socialist countries (Europe, China, India). With all the dog-wagging accounting definition tails, that kind of comparison is so self-selecting as to be useless (except in conning educated voters). The real numbers are "per capita debt". They're horrifying, unless you're a bank, in which case they're almost anaesthetically euphoric.

I might not have been clear enough grammatically (but certainly was, chronologically) to indicate that it was the *Reagan* debt that exceeded all prior American debt combined. With the Reagan debt to contend with, America *can't* borrow the debt required to exceed its previous debt - that kind of money doesn't exist in a ~$30T global economy. Moreover, the Bush debt is just getting started, with his corporate/fatcat tax cuts, $3T(!) budget that includes open-ended "projects" like the booming Terror War catastrophe, drug-company entitlement giveaways. Those economists willing to guess are saying $12-15T in debt over the next 10 years or so. That certainly exceeds the even the $6T debt Bush Jr. "inherited" from the 12-year Reagan/Bush swindle, despite the sound management during the 8-year sanity of Clinton/Gore.

BTW, note that the unprecedentedly Republican partisan Bush has enjoyed control not only of the White House and Congress, but also the Supreme Court which appointed him, and has stayed in bed with him ever since. Even with your 1-year latency, the BushCo government has had everything they could want for 2.5 years. It's no surprise that those years have seen everything turn to disaster for most everyone, except Bush, Cheney, and their partners in crime. Note that somehow, Cheney's Teton County, Wyoming, is somehow the richest county in America. C'mon: the fingerprints of the thieves are everywhere on the burning building we call our planet. Covering up won't make it any less bad for us.

I also note that the Clinton/Gore surplus was *actually collected*. Then *actually spent* by Bush/Cheney. The Clinton/Gore management was so sound that they paid down the deficit, and accumulated a vast defense against the economic fallout from the wildcat economy they managed so well. If you spent the $5T surplus on the 10% of the 100M American workers at risk in the globalizing info economy, that's $500K per worker. If *I* had stolen the 2000 election, posing as the "education president", I would have spent $50K per worker on college tuition for each of our 4 years together, $20K per worker per year on their expenses, and driven that money through the education system. I'd still have $1.5T to put out all kinds of fires, without resorting to debt. Instead, we squandered that on corporate/fatcat handouts that do proportionately little to grow any sustainable economics, and a giant, open-ended Iraqi+ quagmire that is deastroying everyone's chances at a working global economy.

Re:faith-based accounting

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of comparisons, the economy is not going well. I think it worthwhile to look at this graph - specifically, do the graph from 1969 (the year Nixon took office) to 2004. Note that under President Carter, infamous as a "bad president," the percentage of the population employed rose dramatically. Under Reagan's first term, the rate dropped precipitously, only rising above Carter's levels in Reagan's second term. Under Bush 41 the rate plateaued, then dropped again, and stayed at the lower level until the end of his term. When Clinton came in, we saw a dramatic growth in the employment rates, which lasted until Bush 43 took office, at which time the employment rate took another nosedive which seems, finally, to have plateaued. It seems to have hit bottom in September and March, and is coming back up; but it is coming back up from a rate that is two full percentage points lower than the one that prevailed in the first month of the Bush presidency.

The overall rise in this rate from the 1940s is probably due to the much larger percentage of women entering the workforce, and the smaller percentage of those taking early retirement. But after 1990 or so, I doubt gender differences are really significant for this rate. The natural "full employment" is likely around 64% - until the baby-boom hits retirement age, at which point we can expect to see much lower numbers.

Unfortunately, BLS doesn't have numbers for the great depression, but I would expect them to be significantly below the threshold of this chart.

Employment-population ratio (Current Population Survey)
The proportion of the civilian noninstitutional population 16 years and over that is employed

Re:The usual. . .

[Anonymous Coward]

SKYlab, not Spacelab. Spacelab was a module constructed by ESA, to be used in the cargobay of NASA's shuttles.

Also, I agree. Slashing continued support for Hubble is wrong, and seriously, I don't get where he's gonna find the funding for manned Mars missions. I hope he can, though, because it will be a boost for interplanetary science. It's also utterly sad that he's such a fundamentalist, which makes me wonder why he wants this new exploration of the solar system. Certainly not because of the science!

Where is the money?

[benjyfrank]

It does compute.

According to its own auditors, the US Government is posting not millions, not billions, but trillions of dollars in "undocumented transactions." This means, the financial officers responsible simply have no idea what a particular financial flow was used for, or lack the paperwork to rule out fraud or theft.

The IT contractors that built the systems that can't keep track of the money (AMS, Dyncorp, CCC, CACI, and Lockheed Martin among others) have had their multimillion dollar "support" contracts extended year after year.

To quote:

From Department of Defense (DoD)...
"We reported that DoD processed $1.1 trillion in unsupported accounting entries to DoD Component financial data used to prepare departmental reports and DoD financial statements for FY 2000."
David K. Steensma
Acting Assistant Inspector General
for Auditing for the DoD
February 26, 2002

From Housing & Urban Development (HUD)...
"At the time we discontinued our audit work... An additional 242 adjustments totaling about $59.6 billion, were made to adjust fiscal year 1999 activity."
Susan Gaffney
HUD Inspector General
March 22, 2000

"Trillions of dollars in "unsupported adjustments" means trillions of dollars unaccounted for. What's going on? Where is the money? How could this happen? Where are the checks and balances? How much more has gone missing? Is this happening in the other government agencies too? What would happen if a corporation failed to pass an audit like this? Or a taxpayer? Who is responsible for this? Who can we trust to fix it? ... see Frequently Asked Questions and Who's in Charge? for details."

whereisthemoney

auditing money, auditing humans

[zogger]

That 6% figure of unemployment is just not true, not in any practical meaningful sense. They don't count people who have exhausted unemployment insurance benefits, those people are stricken from the official tally, and that's quite a large number now. There are perhaps millions of chronically un- or under- employed people out there now. And they DO count any part time job, no matter how meagre it is, into the "employed" figures, they make no distinctions there, which is quite misleading when you want to look at the economy as a whole. You work one day a week, it goes into the tally looking like a real full time job. that just don't compute. You hang out a shingle as a consultant, take a few jobs, but spend the bulk of your time still not working, it's still classed as if it was a full time job. And more and more even reported jobs, which can be classed as full-part time, are held by people who can't give them up, even though those jobs simply can't maintain any living level they might have held previously, and they can't find better, so they stick with it. That's why we have record mortgage defaults, and record bankruptcies, which are part of looking at the over all economic health. A lot of those folks are just constantly downsized, sometimes all the way into "no" job, and a lot of times into a less well-paying job or a less-hours worked job, but they started at a higher level. In the past, you workled your way up, now people are finding it harder to even maintain a level, and millions keep getting force-dropped down. Our economy has been going BACKWARDS for several years now,well, 20 years basically, and they try every way they can to make it look like it isn't. It's very common now for people to work long times in jobs with well under 40 hours a week, let alone any over-time pay, etc, like was true in years past, and any benefits have dropped as well, all things averaged out. Yet, wall street and government keep insisisting their methods are working, and the economy is getting better. But, you have balance of trade deficits, and levels of debt versus savings to look at, compared to years past,which again prove they are lying in general terms.

It's is NOT getting better, it's not even constant, the economy is retreating, it's getting worse.

Basically, you can double that unemployment figure, and maybe it's higher,and then break it down further by demographics,geography, race, etc. for example,in some urban areas it's already at 30% or so with younger black people, but those are just estimates, because they have no way to really know what they are, no adequate sampling methods exist.

They cook the books, and fail to keep any sort of accurate records, because it's impossible, AND because no way would they publically admit to double figures over-all, because it's a pychological and market driven level that they just can't deal with.

Double-ENTRY bookkeeping

[wowbagger]

The term you are looking for is

double entry bookkeeping

and simply means that for every credit, there must be a corrisponding debit.

As a result, if you sum all the books, the answer should be 0.00 - if it is NOT, then there was a misentry somewhere.

For example, using GnuCash, every time I get paid, an entry debiting an account called "Paycheck" is created, and an entry crediting "Checking" is created, and the two entries are tied together. So over time the "Paycheck" account grows more and more negative. However, this allows me to see exactly how much I've been paid over time.

It's a form of error dectection and correction.

I've a cousin who is a certified bookkeeper and how has been a comptroller for several small companies - I told her about GnuCash and she was VERY interested. Pity I cannot convert her system to Linux at this time, or run GnuCash under Windows (last time I checked).

"Double-booking" is a criminal activity in which a company maintains 2 sets of books (possibly using double-entry bookkeeping on each set), in which one book is the version that gets shown to the auditors and IRS, and one actually has the real facts in it.

They still don't get it.

[Shivetya]

NASA needs to be shut down and replaced. Since that will never happen as Government Employee Unions have too much control the best we can hope for is a reassignment of all the upper management and outsiders brought in to run the place.

NASA has had no real direction for 20+ years. The space shuttle hobbled it beyond compare. It was a stupid 70s pipe dream that should have died on the drawing board. If they are going to build a spaceplane then build one, don't build a rocket lifted glider.

Hopefully the X-Prize will show people that we are capable of putting stuff into space without a monolithic Government entity.

The goals of a moonbase and Mars landing are laudable. They are true attempts to move forward. The space station was a sick waste of money and worse, we were forced to keep the shuttle around just because of it. A base on the moon would finally move us forward. We aren't going to get there with the old NASA mentality which is still stuck in the 70s.

Actually

[ShadowRage]

this bullshit has been going on for years, my Science teacher worked for a contractor that dealed with NASA, he left because of the spending cuts even within the company he worked for, because of the NASA higher ups cutting money to the contractors, and within their own company, he pointed out the reason why columbia ended the way it did was because what he used to do was cut (checked the launch frame by frame for like 5 hours each day) to check for anything odd, and to monitor any mishaps in orbit.... there was even a time with columbia that it faced a threat like that, but the broken panel was ok enough to survive the landing.

So this is nothing new. NASA abuses its position in power to get a lot of cash for doing a whole lot of nothing.

surveys then surveys

[zogger]

I just checked the latest real stats at the BLS website. Go down the chart and look at U-6. That's the sum total of unemployed, the figures the TV normally uses in "business reports" stop at U-3. this is fairly common knowledge, BTW, but the lower number is mostly used for propoganda purposes, once you wipe away the shilling grins of the TV/WS casino traders and various politicians trying to make things look rosy. That's an opinion,I admit it, but it's based on these two quite different numbers.

U-3, which is commonly used for the news shows,the most quoted and used in an argument to show how great the economy is, which counts any sort of employment, is as of April 2004 = 5.4 %

Sounds good, not too bad! Well, lets mosey on down the chart a scosh.

U-6, which is total unemployed including distressed workers, part time (no matter how part time), marginally attached, etc, what I am referring to is, as of april 2004 = 9.3 %

here is their little explanation that will cover U-6

Marginally attached workers are persons who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want
and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past. Discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally
attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for a job. Persons employed part time for economic
reasons are those who want and are available for full-time work but have had to settle for a part-time schedule. For further
information, see "BLS introduces new range of alternative unemployment measures," in the October 1995 issue of the Monthly Labor
Review. Beginning in January 2004, data reflect revised population controls used in the household survey.

url for reference

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t12.htm

There's also a practical consideration with telephone surveys. It's pretty simple, although alien to most people nowadays,especially on slashdot I would guess, but very poor and broke people--uhh, these unemployed we are talking about- in a lot of cases do not have telephones in order to be surveyed. That's usually the first utility to get shut off. I can personally think of 4 families in my (poor underemployed, rural) neighborhood where no telephone exists. Myself, having a cell service, landline and internet connection, am an exception to the rule around here. I don'tknow anyone else around here who has internet. Even the couple of households I know about that have a landline do not have internet. Two families I know of, the father has a beeper, but no phone, they need to drive 2.5 miles to a payphone. I don't know everyone around here yet, but I know the closest people except for one house, who pretty much stay to themselves and don't seem too friendly so I don't push it. The house looks good(large and expensive), I am assuming they have a phone based on that.

That last is just anecdotal, but I hope my points on the *real* numbers are more clear now, and also why telephone surveys might not be as accurate as some claim. By their own admission, the real numbers on a "practical" look on unemployment are almost twice as high (roughly) as they usually use for TV reports. Now, after that, I am of the opinion-note, I said opinion only- it is still lowballed for a few more percentage points. I have reasons for that opinion, fairly involved, some arcane,some I could spend more time on and provide references but I really don't feel like it right now, but all in all I think it's lowballed. I would guess it'scloser to 12 %. I've shown it's offically lowballed already, close to 10, and last month it was slightly over 10% by their own numbers. It will lower next month as high school kids get summer jobs, that will happen too, usually a percent and a fraction then.

I will also freely admit that black market/illegal working is not included, even though no one brought that up to me yet. I have no rational figures to access for inclusion (I don't