A guest post from our good friend Tim Wise at ACTA.
The U.S. General Accountability Office (GAO) has completed its audit of the IRS's Fiscal Years 2011 and 2010 Financial Statements (summary, 1-page highlights and full report, both require Adobe). As the GAO reports, "IRS is a large and complex organization, posing unique operational and financial management challenges for its management. IRS employs over 100,000 people in its Washington, D.C., headquarters and over 700 offices in all 50 states and U.S. territories and in some U.S. embassies and consulates."
In the report highlights, GAO wrote that it found:
"In GAO's opinion, IRS's fiscal years 2011 and 2010 financial statements are fairly presented in all material respects. However, serious internal control and financial management systems deficiencies continued to make it necessary for IRS to use resource-intensive compensating processes to prepare its balance sheet. Because of these and other internal control, compliance, and system-related deficiencies, IRS did not, in GAO's opinion, maintain effective internal control over financial reporting as of September 30, 2011, and thus did not have reasonable assurance that losses and misstatements material to the financial statements would be prevented or detected and corrected timely."
While GAO said that "IRS continued to make strides in addressing its deficiencies in internal control," it also said:
"However, deficiencies remain concerning (1) material weaknesses in internal control over unpaid tax assessments and information security, (2) a significant deficiency in its internal control over tax refund disbursements, (3) a noncompliance with the law concerning the timely release of tax liens, and (4) financial management systems' lack of substantial compliance with FFMIA requirements . . . ."
GAO also points out that 182 recommendations remain "open" from its prior audits of IRS's financial statements. Here is how GAO reports that in more detail on page 14:
"We have reported on IRS's internal control weaknesses in prior audits and have provided IRS recommendations to address these and other less-significant issues. As of the date of this report, 182 recommendations related to our financial statement audits were still open, of which 10 relate to the material weakness in internal control over unpaid tax assessments, 105 relate to the material weakness in internal control over information security, and 9 relate to issues encompassed by the significant deficiency in internal control over tax refund disbursements. For more details on the material weaknesses and the significant deficiency identified as a result of our audit, see appendix I."
IRS's "management discussion and analysis" begins on page 23, which contains a great deal of informative data about the IRS, including a number of charts and tables. The financial statements begin on page 58.
HT Tax Prof Blog.