Grounding the Hype: Audit the Ft. Knox Gold!
Dr. Ron Paul, U.S. Representative from Texas, wants to have an audit of the gold held at Ft. Knox that is under the supposed control of the Federal Reserve. He even plans to introduce legislation next year to force the Fed to conduct an audit:
“If there was no question about the gold being there, you think they would be anxious to prove gold is there,” he said of the Federal Reserve.
This is not the first time the congressman has made his pitch. “In the early 1980s when I was on the gold commission, I asked them to recommend to the Congress that they audit the gold reserves – we had 17 members of the commission and 15 voted no to the audit,” said Paul. “I think there was only one decent audit done 50 years ago,” he said.
Paging Dr. Paul! Paging Dr. Paul! The U.S. gold reserves held at Ft. Knox and elsewhere are actually under the control of the U.S. Mint, a bureau of the U.S. Treasury Department, and these gold reserves are ALREADY being audited by the independent accounting firm KPMG. In fact, an annual audit has been ongoing for a number of years, first by inspectors of the U.S. Treasury Department since the 1980s (Treasury inspectors are sworn federal law enforcement personnel) with additional audits by independent accounting firms starting in the 1990s.
When KPMG was appointed independent auditors for the 2005 fiscal year, the accounting firm insisted on a revised audit format that involved a complete audit included accompanying Treasury inspectors on the physical count of bullion in vault facilities at the Ft. Knox and West Point bullion depositories. Prior to this and despite Dr. Paul’s claim that the last audit was conducted in the 1950s, Treasury inspectors had conducted rotating audits of bullion held at the Ft. Knox, West Point and other depositories since the 1980s as part of a comprehensive overhaul of governmental accountability by the Office of the Management and Budget. These audits include test weighing and assays that have periodically revealed minor discrepancies in bullion fineness and weight over the years. Not all the bullion is counted each year, mind you, rather it is done on a rotating basis with Treasury seals being placed on each audited vault. The inspectors check at least on an annual basis that these seals have not been tampered with. According to my reckoning, all vaults should have been initially rotated through a few years ago, which means that the vaults now being inspected are already on their second or third audit pass.
Recent Comments