It was born in the Harding administration, and now it’s celebrating its 90th year: the bureau formerly known as the General Accounting Office.
To mark the anniversary, the GAO has posted a
The video includes interviews with the current Comptroller General, Gene Dodaro, and his predecessors David Walker and Charles Bowsher, who were both former Arthur Andersen partners. There is a bit of irony in that, since Andersen would later implode in the wake of accounting scandals at its clients Enron and WorldCom, but then so did the Harding administration after the Teapot Dome scandal.
Walker changed the name of the GAO to the Government Accountability Office in 2004 and the following year began warning people about the dangers he was seeing in the ballooning federal budget deficit. The agency has increasingly been involved in tracking government agencies and programs, but nowadays only about 15 percent of its employees have financial backgrounds. Dodaro is the first career civil servant to lead the agency, notwithstanding the efforts of the AICPA a year or two ago to pass a law requiring the Comptroller General to always be a CPA. The first Comptroller General was a lawyer.
The agency is keeping close tabs on its fellow agencies and their programs, including the IRS. And its work may eventually help rein in the growing budget deficit, assuming Democrats and Republicans can ever agree on what to do about it.