Last year, the The Pentagon failed its sixth consecutive annual audit. An Arizona lawmaker has a proposal for how to help the Department of Defense finally pass one: using artificial intelligence.
On Friday, Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) introduced legislation that would direct the Secretary of Defense to use artificial intelligence technology to audit the Pentagon's financial statements for the current fiscal year.
With $3.8 trillion in assets and a 2024 budget of about $850 billion, the Department of Defense is the largest and most well-funded department of the federal government. It has long been a bottomless pit of money. Unlike other government agencies, the Pentagon cannot fully trace all of its assets and track where its resources go. Since 2018, the organization has tried to audit itself and has repeatedly failed. Last year, the Pentagon hailed its latest failed attempt to pass an audit as “gradual progress” to a clean bill of financial health.
According The Intercept, the Department of Defense has created an artificial intelligence program to try to navigate its annual budget. Large accounting firms EY and KPMG have unveiled initiatives to use artificial intelligence in certain aspects of audits and accounting. In September, the IRS was announced would use artificial intelligence to help “compliance teams better detect tax evasion” by the wealthy.
Schweikert's legislation would direct the Defense Department's comptroller to develop AI technology, in consultation with the department's inspector general, to facilitate audits of the Pentagon's financial statements.
“As of 2018, the federal government has spent nearly $1 billion a year trying to audit the Department of Defense, and it costs much more to correct mistakes after it's done,” Schweikert said in a statement. “This legislation helps accelerate the adoption of innovative audit tools to reduce costs and promote creative solutions that will increase government accountability. I look forward to working with my colleagues to help modernize how Congress exercises such oversight to protect hardworking taxpayers.”
The bill received praise from the Project On Government Oversight, a nonpartisan oversight group that has focused on reducing waste at the Pentagon for decades.
Omar Tabuni, director of government affairs at POGO, says Rolling rock that “it's encouraging to see some members of Congress thinking of new ways to leverage new technologies and new approaches to long-standing, intractable problems like the Pentagon's ongoing fiscal failure.”
Some observers have criticized the Pentagon's efforts to integrate AI into its operations, particularly in the field of warfighting, and have separately expressed concern about the reliability of AI against so-called AI “hallucinations” — mistakes and errors introduced by software .
Tabuni's watchdog group, POGO, believes the Pentagon's financial problems are bad enough to warrant the use of artificial intelligence.
“Each year the Department of Defense makes up more than half of the federal government's discretionary budget and is likely to reach $1 trillion in annual spending over the next two fiscal year cycles, all funded by taxpayer dollars,” Tabuni says. adding: “Congress must find innovative and responsible ways to pass DOD audits.”
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