For decades, environmental and forestry groups, government agencies and think tanks have battled over the sale of timber from public land at prices that lose money for the government. Not long ago, Congress asked the General Accounting Office to look into the issue, as it has before, and its results released last week show that none of the groups have known what the actual losses amount to because the Forest Service itself doesn’t know.

Some would make the case that benefits from below-cost timber sales – say, lower-cost building supplies – make the regular losses by the Forest Service acceptable; a few argue that not all lands harvested should be required to break even every year. The new GAO study doesn’t address this issue but instead asks whether an informed discussion on the extent of the losses is even possible. It isn’t because of accounting practices that make an accurate tally of the tens or perhaps hundreds of millions lost each year impossible to assess.

The Forest Service knows this. In 1998 and ’99, the inspector general from the Department of Agriculture couldn’t reach a conclusion about the financial management of the service, according to the GAO, because the information it produced was neither timely nor reliable. One disturbing accounting practice allowed Forest Service employees to rewrite past financial records, essentially erasing an audit trail. Along with the huge volume of transactions, this practice, says the GAO “made it impracticable, if not impossible, for us or anyone to accurately determine the Forest Service’s timber sales program costs.”

Two examples of poor record keeping suggest that the lack of accountability isn’t the result of a misunderstanding by the Forest Service but an attempt to stretch budgets. In one, staff time was charged to a program based on how much time was budgeted for the employee, not the actual time worked. That means a person working on timber sales might not have his or her salary reflected in the cost of the sale. Second, something called “retroactive redistribution” allowed the Forest Service to reassign costs depending on which program had available funds and not based on which program actually incurred the cost. This sort of bureaucratic creativity isn’t the worse example of government number fiddling ever reported, but it does make it impossible to identify what the timber program actually costs.

The GAO, as it has in the past, wants the Forest Service to clean up its accounting procedures and file its reports in a more timely manner. These are needed improvements that Congress should support –

as should the various groups that have been arguing over the service’s specious numbers for decades.