'Clean audit' not any time soon at the Pentagon.

• Position: Brief Article

The Pentagon is not likely to meet a 2007 self-imposed deadline to overhaul its financial information systems. Congress reprimanded the Defense Department two years ago for failing to provide a "clean audit' of how it spends its annual appropriations of nearly $500 billion. The Pentagon subsequently created a "business management modernization program" that would consolidate hundreds of outdated, incompatible financial systems into a modern "enterprise" database that could track every business transaction in the Defense Department. The project, however, has struggled and has fallen short of expectations, says Paul Brinkley, the Pentagon's special assistant for business transformation.

"The...