Word: gao
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...meantime, Greenspan also urged federal regulators to take a hint from the GAO report released last week and try to tighten their supervision of banking operations. The report noted that 22 of the 406 banks that failed in 1988 and 1989 never appeared on the FDIC's problem-bank list. "Banks have been able to hide their nonperforming loans," contends Robert Litan, a banking expert at the Brookings Institution. Such subterfuge would be more difficult if banks were to undergo annual on-site inspections. Until 1956 federal regulations required two such audits a year, but by the 1980s some banks...
...Navy claimed that the 1989 gun-turret explosion that killed 47 sailors on the battleship U.S.S. Iowa was "most probably" caused by sabotage, its investigation was widely criticized as sloppy and its conclusion as unjustified. Last week testimony by the General Accounting Office gave the critics strong support. The GAO found that the disaster may not have been triggered by a crewman, Gunner's Mate Clayton Hartwig, as the Navy hypothesized...
...tests conducted at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, the GAO discovered that the 94-lb. powder bags used in the Iowa's 16-in. guns could ignite if rammed into the breech at high speed. More significantly, traces of calcium and chlorine found in the cannon did not prove that the blast had been set off by a saboteur's detonator; similar residues were detected in the gun turrets on two other battleships. After confirming the GAO tests, the Navy suspended live cannon fire on all four of its battleships and reopened its investigation of the Iowa tragedy. Physical evidence...
...inefficiencies that date back more than 50 years. Recent probes by the General Accounting Office have discovered broad areas of error and mismanagement. A study covering 1987, notes Burnham, concluded that the IRS failed to keep orderly accounts of its $1 trillion annual collections. For the same year, the GAO found that nearly half its samplings of 6 million notices and letters that the service sent to taxpayers were "incorrect, unresponsive, unclear or incomplete...
...that no one knows how severe the problems may be. In a report to Congress last month, the General Accounting Office described the same pattern of sloppy accounting and slack Government supervision that allowed the S&L debacle to go unchecked. Because many agencies kept such poor books, GAO auditors could not even determine how much of the $5 trillion is at risk of default. "The ignorance, incompetence and corruption in many of the Government loan and loan-guarantee programs are appalling," says Dingell...