The Audit

An auditor gives one of four opinions. An unmodified (clean) opinion says the statements are fairly presented. A qualified opinion says they are fairly presented except for stated matters. An adverse opinion says they are materially misstated. A disclaimer says the auditors could not obtain sufficient, appropriate audit evidence to support any opinion. The Inspector General's 2022 press release uses that definition for the FY2022 disclaimer.

A disclaimer reports that the auditors could not obtain sufficient, appropriate audit evidence to support an opinion. It states that the evidence needed for an opinion was not available. It does not state an amount of lost or stolen funds, and each figure below is described in those terms.

The counts differ by source and year. For fiscal year 2018 the Inspector General counted 21 entities. GAO's 2026 testimony counts 24 stand-alone audits for the same year: 16 disclaimers, 6 clean opinions and 2 qualified. For fiscal year 2022 the Inspector General's November 2022 press release gave a preliminary count of 6 clean opinions, 1 qualified and 16 disclaimers with 2 audits ongoing; its May 2023 report gave the final count of 9, 1 and 16.

For fiscal year 2025 the Inspector General reports 22 stand-alone audits, of which 21 produced opinions. GAO's testimony counts 28 reporting entities and 11 disclaimers, against the Inspector General's 9. The Congressional Research Service counts 26 entity-level audits.

The Congressional Research Service dates the underlying audit requirement to the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990. In May 2026 GAO testified that DoD is the only one of the 24 agencies covered by that Act that has never obtained a clean opinion on its department-wide statements.

The first full audit therefore arrived on the statutory schedule, one year after the readiness date. Its result was the disclaimer of 15 November 2018. At the time the Inspector General reported that the DoD Chief Financial Officer called it one of the largest financial statement audits in history, and that DoD did not expect a clean opinion.

The Inspector General's FY2024 report states that "comparing the number of material weaknesses from year to year is not a reliable way to measure progress towards a clean financial statement opinion." The table records what the auditors reported in each year.

The component-level figures also differ between reports. The FY2024 report states 151 material weaknesses and 2,848 notices of findings across components. The FY2025 report states 121 entity-level weaknesses, described as 21 fewer than the prior year, and 2,485 notices of findings, described as 427 fewer. Taken against the FY2024 totals, the stated reductions do not reconcile: 151 less 21 is 130, and 2,848 less 427 is 2,421. Neither report explains the difference.

The count of clean opinions is one measure of progress that the audit reports record. It rose from 5 in fiscal year 2018 to 11 in fiscal years 2024 and 2025 in the Inspector General's reports, and the Marine Corps has held a clean opinion since fiscal year 2023. The denominators vary: 21 to 29 entities in the Inspector General's reports, 24 to 29 in GAO's counts and 26 in the Congressional Research Service's count.

The clean opinions cover a smaller share of assets than their number suggests. GAO's September 2025 report states that the eleven components with clean opinions in FY2024 held 42.8 percent of DoD's reported assets, and that nearly all of that share relates to the Military Retirement Fund. The Congressional Research Service reports that the components with disclaimers account for 43 percent of assets and at least 64 percent of budgetary resources. The disclaimers cover the Army, Navy and Air Force.

The report states in a footnote that the two headline amounts "are not cumulative and should not be added together." The Inspector General found that 137,618 of the unsupported adjustments, worth $4 trillion, were generated by systems and not by a person. In one example a net unsupported adjustment of $99.8 billion was applied to an intragovernmental receivable balance of $0.2 billion.

The DFAS Indianapolis Director disagreed with the dollar values. The Director's response stated that the figures were a misrepresentation, because 22 adjustments totaling $1.4 trillion were counted in both the third-quarter and the year-end amounts. The Inspector General disagreed with the response and added the footnote that the amounts are not cumulative.

An adjustment is an entry that changes a ledger balance, usually to make the general ledger agree with another record such as a property book. An adjustment is unsupported when the file does not show why the entry was made or whether it was correct. The size of an adjustment is the size of the change to the ledger. It does not measure spending or lost funds.

The FY2025 report shows that the weakness persists, with adjustments of more than $859 billion in the last two quarters of that year and unsupported adjustments still listed as a material weakness. The Inspector General's report does not give the unsupported share of the $859 billion.

Section 1004 excludes military personnel and Defense Health Program accounts. Section 920 of the same Act requires audit-remediation metrics by 30 April 2025 and an evaluation of using them in the performance evaluations of senior officers and senior executives. The FY2026 Act, in section 1002, requires a funding estimate for corrective action plans, a ranking of components by auditability, and annual reports from the bottom quartile. Section 1005 of that Act extends the component audit requirement to 2035.

No cited source records that any component has lost 1.5 percent of its unobligated funds under section 1004. Breaking Defense reported on 19 December 2025 that the acting Comptroller, Jules Hurst, wrote to Congress that the department would not reach its 2028 goal without a significant acceleration of its efforts, and that a revised strategy would follow in fiscal year 2026.

GAO's May 2026 testimony examined the revised approach. It states that the approach "would be deprioritizing remediating key internal control deficiencies for two or more years." GAO counted 17 scope-limiting weaknesses, of which one has been resolved.

The 18 of 96 and 14 of 58 figures refer to different samples at the same facility, and the 58 of 104 figure refers to a different facility. GAO also verified all 187 pod records at a Raytheon facility and all sample items in the Defense Property Accountability System. The Air Force concurred with one recommendation and partially concurred with the other.

Two smaller physical tests also found discrepancies. For fiscal year 2021 the Inspector General reported that auditors from Ernst & Young found the Navy's records showing eight guided missile fin assemblies at a contractor's site, and a physical count found two. In 2023 the Inspector General found that the F-35 program office lacked a valid population of Joint Strike Fighter inventory, and that 41 of 217 part numbers reviewed (19 percent) had at least one existence or completeness error.

The Inspector General's FY2025 report counts 297 major financial systems and states a plan to retire 39 of them by the end of fiscal year 2027. GAO's FY2023 snapshot records DoD officials saying that the rate of remediation fell because the department first addressed the less complex issues.

The audits have also located assets. GAO's snapshot records that the Navy added nearly $2.4 billion in assets in fiscal year 2020 that it had not known to exist. The Congressional Research Service records $4.3 billion in Navy equipment that DoD reports it had not been tracking.

The Inspector General's FY2025 report plans substantive testing of physical assets in fiscal year 2026, and its count shows 929 notices of findings without a remediation date. GAO states that the revised approach would postpone work on internal controls. The Inspector General reported its FY2025 results in December 2025, and the FY2026 results had not been published as of 9 November 2026.

Four questions are open in the record. The first is whether the FY2026 audit will produce another disclaimer. The second is whether any component has lost funds under section 1004. The third is how the Inspector General's component-level weakness and finding counts for FY2024 and FY2025 reconcile. The fourth is what share of the more than $859 billion in FY2025 adjustments was unsupported.

The department-wide result is documented for each of the eight years. The Inspector General issued a disclaimer in each, GAO states that DoD has never obtained a clean opinion, and Congress has set 31 December 2028 as the date for an unqualified opinion. None of the cited sources reports an amount of money lost.