Thirteen clean audits — the Secret Service is inside them.

The Secret Service does not receive its own financial-statement audit opinion. Since it moved from the Treasury Department to the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, its books consolidate into DHS's department-wide statements — and those statements have earned an unmodified (clean) opinion every year for over a decade. The largest federal department has never earned one. The difference is whether financial data traces, reliably, from a recorded transaction back to its source — the discipline a clean opinion requires, and the discipline this monitor practices.

The audit record

    Why this monitor

    A multi-year clean-opinion streak proves the standard is reachable for a sprawling, multi-component department — when financial data can be traced from a recorded transaction back to its authorization. Every figure on this Secret Service monitor resolves to a published source and recomputes against the budget's own arithmetic — the three appropriations re-adding to the published net discretionary subtotal in every fiscal column, the mandatory annuity contribution kept strictly separate from the discretionary headline. That is the same data discipline a clean opinion demands, demonstrated on the public record.

    Sources are linked at each node. The clean-opinion record is drawn from the DHS OIG independent auditor's reports and the DHS Agency Financial Report — into which the Secret Service is consolidated; the DoD contrast is drawn from DoD's own audit reports and GAO's High-Risk List. The department-wide arc is on the DHS audit page.

    See something to improve, want to request a change, or have a question? Leave a note — this monitor is built in public and we iterate live.