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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.'"
Does this mean I won't be getting my flying car this year?
NASA = Need A Second Accountant!
NASA: "The 360 ate our paper tape"
- Sherman
So their annual budget this year is $14 billion or so.
Where does the $565 billion come from?
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?
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
If I understand it correctly, that paragraph would make it seem that the number $565 billion actually double- or triple-counts the amount of money that is poorly accounted for. Of course, $200+ billion is still not pocket change...
I'm wondering though - they don't actually say what part of that process was the problem. Making appropriate debits and credits to correct errors seems reasonable to me, but all I have to balance is my checkbook. Is there some other way to correct errors in the books? Or should NASA presumably have not been making errors to begin with?
Maybe they should have been using some of that $565 billion to hire better accountants?
All the more reason for private companies to get into the space business. I'm not saying that private companies can't cook the books, but at least there's laws in place to handle that.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
$565 billion posted to its accounts?!?
With that kind of cash, screw Mars, let's go straight to Europa.
NASA's whole budget request for 2004 was 15.5 billion.
At that rate, it'd take them oh, say 40 years to save up 500+ billion.
Something does not compute.
Check it here.
I was going to say something about the editing, but what's the point? Like it's going to change at this late date.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
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.
"They can send a man to the moon, but they can't balance the damn checkbook?"
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).
"If their MONEY calculations are in such condition, how do their spaceships even rise off the ground?"
Apparently by the explosive combustion of billions of small, unmarked bills crammed into the fuel tank.
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.
"Why not make space, or at least the space around the earth, the same as the air: the space above a particular country belongs to that country, space above the international oceans is open to all. Thus it would be necessary to have other countries' permissions before orbiting anything over them..."
This is completely impractical for everything except Geosynchronous satellites. Most satellites' orbits are designed to accomplish specific mission objectives, and if they happen to fly directly over (say) Burma, North Korea, or Zimbabwe that's just how it works. If you are interested in general orbit mechanics, you could consult Bate, Mueller and White's Fundamentals of Astrodynamics. More specifics about orbit mission design are in Wertz and Larsen's Space Mission Analysis and Design. Each is a classic.
Political problems: This would give every 2-penny tinpot dictator in the world license to put up a tollbooth in space. Should a scientific satellite that measures worldwide ocean wave heights have to get permission from said dictators to fly over their countries? How about search and rescue satellites? Telecommunications? GPS?
As to the issue of Moon resources... well I'm not too sure what sorts of treaties have been ratified, but I think it's a little early to worry about it. Even if there are tons of He-3 on the Moon we have no way to make use of it. Just about every other material resource on the moon (Al, O, Mg, etc) is in abundance on Earth. These resources will be useful for in-situ manufacturing, but economically not worth the candle here.
Please don't tell me they forgot to convert from Yen (or Euro) to USD.
Not that NASA would be so stupid as to forget to convert units....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
All that cash and they couldn't make a better movie?
An error of this magnitude is inconceivable. It really makes me think the figure must be $565 million, in which case this is pretty small potatoes for a big organization that's been around for a long time. (Lose track of $28 million a year - 0.2% of your budget - for 20 years and there's your number.) It certainly reflects inefficiency at NASA, but is there anyone, anywhere, who would be surprised by inefficiency at NASA?
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.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
$565 billion here. $565 billion there. Pretty soon you're talking about real money.
This comment was generated by a Squadron of Ultra Ninjas
if that be the case, then where does this $565 billion number come from? it seems that they have simply counted the same pile of money for several times, without noticing that it has already been taken into account: "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."
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Let's be realistic, here; we're talking about the USA, where corporations are, by and large, getting off the hook one way or another left and right. Prominent examples of this can be found in Enron (barely a slap on the rist of those most responsible), Microsoft (a slap on the wrist, at most), Martha Stewart (convicted, but sentenced to a minimum security prison that seems to have been the inspiration for the no-security facility Sideshow Bob was sentenced to do time in), Halliburton (yet to face any sort of prosecution whatsoever, to my knowledge), and Wal*Mart (they find out in a self-audit that they were abusing labor laws... and the governments of those various states let them off after they promise to fix it).
I'm not sure which is more easily and quickly held responsible, but I'd still rather have NASA around, trying to do the job. I'd explain further, but my mind is all discombobulated from lack of sleep.
~UP
Eat the Path.
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
Eat the Path.
sending us (and the world) into a recession larger in real terms than even the Great Depression
I think it would be hard to argue that our current recession is larger (or worse) than the great depression. Perhaps if you look only at the raw number of layoffs it could look as bad, but obviously that is not an accurate representation.
I was working at Intel from 2000 - 2003, and can remember exactly when the economy started to go south. It was in the fall of 2000 (only 7 months after Bush took office)... We had just posted record earnings for the last quarter of over 8.7 Billion... and yet the same day our stock plummeted... and so did everyone else's. All of the sudden everyone realized that all this "infinite growth" crap that was flying around wasn't true. The bubble began to burst...the Do-com's began to fail... causing problems with all traditional Hi-tech companies such as Intel. It then spread into the telecom... because now nobody wanted to buy all that newly available bandwidth. Since the dot-comers were all broke now after being so overpaid... it began to have a peripheral effect on the economy in general, from food service and parking lots, to cars and housing. Then came September 11th... bringing the airline and tourism economies to their knees. Even though we have a fairly resilient economy... there were just too many sectors struggling now... and we entered a good sized recession.
Now I don't see George Bush directly involved in any of the events that caused the recession. I think it's a safe bet to make that even if Gore had been in office, the tech bubble still would have burst...simply because it was not based on sound economics. 9/11 may or may not have happened if gore were in office...I don't know if the extremists who carried out that mission would have been "appeased" in time to make a difference (I say appeased because that's the only thing that might have made a difference, If say Gore decided to pull all troops from Saudi Arabia, which is what UBL was really so pissed off about in the first place... but anyway Clinton didn't want close that Saudi base to the best of my knowledge, so I don't see why gore would want to)
( Side note: one could argue that Iraq was indirectly responsible for 9/11... UBL offered to defend the Saudis from Iraq when Iraq invaded Kuwait, and was eyeing Saudi Arabia... but his home country shunned him...especially since he had already been kicked out if the country by his own people at that time. The Saudis and Kuwaitis then ASKED for our help... so we came and kicked some Iraqi ass. Ya... the main reason why we helped was to protect our oil supply... but geewiz... its sure too bad that your country looks out for you and TRIES to keep the gas prices from getting out of control.
Anyway...UBL was now thourghly pissed at the US... not only because we were a non Arab country in a Holy Islamic land... but because he had been shunned by his own people... And the US had been the heroes rather than him and his band of gorilla fighters.
Hence... if Iraq wouldn't have invaded... UBL wouldn't have a reason to be quite so pissed off.)
All in all... I think the evidence points towards ourselves (especially the IT crowd) as the reason for the tech slump, and the following recession. How many of you knew that you were being overpaid for your work in the tech heydays... and yet you took the job anyway??? I know I sure did! Why would I turn down the extra cash?!?! After all I was a tech... Not an economist. And sure we liked to complain about our pointy haired bosses who made really dumb decisions... but hey... if they were dumb enough to pay us so much... we would be dumb enough to stick around. We were all guilty by association.
Ill I ask is that people TRY to be reasonable... I don't think GWB is the greatest prez... but it seems foolish to try to paste all blame on one man (or party).
It does compute.
... see Frequently Asked Questions and Who's in Charge? for details."
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?
whereisthemoney
Karani -- Gebrauchte Notebooks am Checkpoint Charlie.
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.
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
As several other posters have pointed out, the physics of orbiting the Earth pretty much makes this a idea no-go. There was some talk about this in the pre-Sputnik days, and the US was quite worried about how to handle the resulting jurisdictional mess. Luckily for them the USSR launched Sputnik, which then provided a precedent for orbital space being managed differently than airspace, and we ended up with the current system.
As I was writing in my blog, as it is now, space seems a bit like the wild west - noone cares who they fly over, or what's orbiting above them, or whatever.
This is fundamentally untrue. For starters, the geostationary belt (aka Clarke orbit, or 35,786 km), which is the only orbit that can be reasonably tied to geographical location, is very tightly managed. Different countries have assigned "slots" in GEO, and can use them or sell them as they see fit. Missions in other orbits require a certain amount of coordination in order to ensure that collisions don't take place, and the RF transmission don't interfere with each other.
Or better yet put them all under the total control of the UN, as things too big for one nation to claim for itself.
Which is in fact roughly what was done. You may want to look at the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, and then remove your foot from your mouth.
but just because the US is powerful right now doesn't mean it should have total rights to everything it finds in space
It doesn't. See above.
Personally I wish there were more collaborative space exploration. Instead of 3 countries/consortiums sending a probe each to Mars, we could have a probe to Mars, one to Europa, and one to Venus.
The recent Mars Exploration Rover carried a German (IIRC) spectrometer. It was also going to be doing some communications via the European Mars Express mission (don't know if it actually did or not). Also, note that MER, Mars Express, and the Japanese Mars mission were all carrying different instruments and had different goals. In that sense, they were all performing part of a collaborative exploration of the planet Mars.