Twenty-five clean audits in a row — and the year the streak broke.
The Environmental Protection Agency earned an unmodified (clean) financial-audit opinion every year from 1998 through 2024 — one of the strongest unbroken records in the federal government. In FY2025 the EPA Inspector General issued a disclaimer of opinion, ending the streak — not because EPA could not account for its assets, but because the auditor could not resolve multiple uncertainties, including ongoing litigation and GAO inquiries. We show both facts. The largest federal department, by contrast, has never earned a single clean opinion.
The audit record
Why this monitor
A decades-long clean-opinion streak proves the standard is reachable — when financial data can be traced from a recorded transaction back to its authorization. The FY2025 disclaimer is a reminder of the opposite: when uncertainties pile up — unresolved litigation, contested liabilities, system-change documentation — even a strong agency loses the ability to attest cleanly. Both directions make the same case. Every figure on this monitor resolves to a published source and recomputes against the budget's own arithmetic — the appropriation accounts to the published Agency Total, to the dollar. That is the data discipline a clean opinion demands, demonstrated on the public record.
Sources are linked at each node. The clean-opinion record is drawn from EPA OIG independent auditor's reports and EPA's Agency Financial Report; the FY2025 disclaimer is stated verbatim from EPA OIG Report 26-F-0007 (Dec 31, 2025). The DoD contrast is drawn from DoD's own audit press releases and GAO's High-Risk List.