Marines remain the only service with clean books after third audit

The Marine Corps announced on Monday that it passed its third consecutive clean financial audit, remaining the only US military service to have done so. The Department of Defense has not passed an audit since audits became legally required in 2018. The Pentagon was recently authorized an annual budget of nearly $840 billion and could see a substantial increase to $1.5 trillion under the current Trump administration.

Officials said years of systems modernization helped untangle long-standing financial and logistics chokepoints. Lt. Gen. James Adams III said the audit process enabled accurate global tracking and reporting of financial transactions, inventory of facilities, equipment and assets, and accounting for taxpayer dollars; auditors also tested the Corps' network, key business systems, and internal controls.

The Corps still relies heavily on human review, but automation and artificial intelligence are already easing the workload — one automation system saved 20,000 hours of reconciliation.

United States

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