Is the Obama administration using bad accounting to hide healthcare failures?

by Sam Rolley / Personal Liberty Digest

The Government Accountability Office issued a report this week detailing how the Obama administration has failed to adequately document where $3.7 billion in taxpayer money was spent promoting Obamacare’s online marketplace.

“CMS’s processes are inconsistent with certain federal accounting and internal control standards,” the report states.

GAO officials reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) doesn’t properly track certain data necessary to determining whether the law is working. Part of the problem, according to GAO officials, is that CMS uses an outdated records system incapable of responding to data requests from public officials. Rather than receiving the data directly from the network, officials charged with keeping the government’s budget in check must rely on manually produced spreadsheets that take months for CMS to prepare.

This means that government auditors tasked with determining whether Obamacare is working must do their jobs with outdated and sometimes incomplete information.

A major area of concern with CMS’s data-reporting processes involved its Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, which has worked closely with state governments to implement Obamacare. According to the GAO report, that department was unable to track spending on advertising, polling, staff and travel, among other things, for auditors.

In fact, the GAO auditors reported that the only verifiable data CMS was able to provide consisted of “estimates for total obligations for fiscal year 2014, which was $3.7 billion; the number of staff as of September 30, 2013, which was 347; and total salary expenditures from March 2010 through fiscal year 2013, which were $79.8 million.”

Outgoing House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-Mich.), who ordered the GAO report, slammed the Obama administration in a statement Tuesday.

“After promising transparency and then ignoring repeated requests from Congress, we now find out that the administration is not even keeping track of how many taxpayer dollars are going out the door,” he said. “Worse yet, the administration won’t even account for how much it spent on public relations campaigns promoting their unpopular law.”