WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense has waged war on two fronts in the Middle East, kept complicated fighter, bomber and transport aircraft flying all over the world and schooled troops in high-level intelligence gathering, but it hasn’t won the battle of the balance sheet after more than 20 years of engagement.

It’s not that the department can’t pass a routine financial audit, giving taxpayers an assurance the Pentagon knows how its spending their dollars in these tight budget times.

It’s worse than that.

The department isn’t even ready for an independent auditor to comb through a partial snapshot of its finances, much less for a nitty-gritty audit.

Certified public accountant and Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, is one of the officials on the case, and the Pentagon is getting there, marching forward more recently than since the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990 codified a requirement for government agencies to be financially audited.

“It’s been a difficult road,” said Alvin Tucker, executive director of the American Society of Military Comptrollers based in Alexandria, Va.

Tucker doesn’t speak for the DOD — not anymore. He was deputy chief financial officer at the department when the act passed in 1990.

These days, deadlines loom for the nation’s warriors and their accountants.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta decreed in October that the Pentagon must have an annual “statement of budgetary resources” ready for an independent audit by Sept. 30, 2014. The statement looks at how much money has been made available, obligated and spent, and how much is left.

It’s just a piece of the department’s financial picture.

“You eat an elephant one bite at a time,” Conaway said.

The big deadline is Sept. 30, 2017. The department then must be ready for a full financial-statement audit as mandated by Congress in 2010.

Rep. Mac Thornberry, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he doesn’t think the department has been trying very hard to get ready for an audit, although it has faced legitimate obstacles.

“It’s not like they can shut down for a couple weeks and redo alltheir accounting systems,” said Thornberry, R-Texas. “They’ve still got to stand guard around the world.”

On the other hand, it shouldn’t be this hard and take this long, he said.

One obstacle the department faces is its size.

“There’s no other organization in the world that has the size and the scope and the geographic dispersion of the Department of Defense,” Tucker said.

The DOD has people worldwide who create millions of transactions daily, as well as assets all over the world, he said.

Each branch — Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines — is bigger than most American companies, according to the Pentagon’s Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness website.

The department has a yearly budget taking up 56 percent of the federal government’s discretionary spending and also owns 86 percent of government assets.

It has more than $1 trillion in combined budgetary resources — a fact the DOD gleaned from the federal government’s Consolidated Financial Statements.

So does the DOD know where all this stuff and the associated money goes?

“They say they do know, that they can account for where all the money goes,” Thornberry said.

He wants something more concrete.

“Until we have the whole department able to withstand an audit, I don’t think we will know with 100 percent certainty where every dollar goes,” he said.

Not only is the DOD big, in possession of a lot of stuff and in command of a lot of people all over the world, but it’s also been using dusty, old accounting systems to track all that.

“They don’t allow for quick analysis and thorough analysis,” said Conaway, formerly an energy business accountant. He is chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s panel on defense financial management and auditability reform.

“You’ve got Black Hawk helicopters that are owned by the Army and the Navy,” Conaway said. “You’ve got inventories of spare parts that weren’t necessarily acquired at the same price.”

There is plenty of room for confusion, flawed comparisons, bad data and missing documentation. An auditor typically selects transactions and checks documentation supporting them.

“He wants that stuff quick,” Tucker said. “But the department has a hard time finding the data, finding the documents.”

(Trish Choate is Washington correspondent for the Wichita Falls Times Record News. Contact her at choate@shns.com.)