Deuteronomy 25:13-16 is among the numerous Bible passages that stress the absolute importance of honest and accurate weights and measures in business and personal relationships and reminds us of the fact that God detests those who violate this injunction:

“You shall not have in your bag two kinds of weights, a large and a small. You shall not have in your house two kinds of measures, a large and a small. A full and fair weight you shall have, a full and fair measure you shall have, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you. For all who do such things, all who act dishonestly, are an abomination to the LORD your God.”

And Proverbs 11:1 leaves no doubt about how God views weights and measures that fail to match His standard: “A false balance is an abomination to the LORD, but a just weight is his delight.”

Unfortunately, the way the federal government and many state and municipal governments account to their citizens how they spend their tax dollars fails the scriptural standard. For Sheila Weinberg, founder and chief executive officer of Truth-in-Accounting (TIA), working to correct this fact is a full-time job. Her organization is a nonprofit government watchdog based in Glencoe, Illinois.

The heart of the problem, according to Weinberg, is an obscure public/private council called the Government Accounting Standards Board (GASB), which describes itself in these terms:

“Established in 1984, the [GASB] is the independent, private-sector organization based in Norwalk, Connecticut, that establishes accounting and financial reporting standards for U.S. state and local governments that follow Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The GASB standards are recognized as authoritative by state and local governments, state Boards of Accountancy, and the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA). The GASB develops and issues accounting standards through a transparent and inclusive process intended to promote financial reporting that provides useful information to taxpayers, public officials, investors, and others who use financial reports.”

But that description doesn’t tell the whole story of how government accounting standards are created and issued, or the deceptive results that routinely follow. The GASB is subject to another entity: “The Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) supports and oversees the GASB. Established in 1972, the FAF is the independent, private-sector, not-for-profit organization responsible for the oversight, administration, financing, and appointment of the GASB and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB).”

The people on these several entities come from state and local governments, the accounting industry, the academic world, and the federal government. The result, Weinberg contends, is anything but an accounting authority that is fundamentally independent of the official bodies that adhere to the issued standards. It is also important to note that private and public corporations operate under different, stricter accounting rules.

“The single most needed reform of the GASB is to make the board truly independent. Too many members come from government or government-affiliated organizations that have a direct stake in how financial results are presented, which can influence the standards that are set. As a result, the current structure produces rules that do not give citizens clear, useful information about government finances, including what policies are sustainable or how to evaluate elected officials,” Weinberg told The Washington Stand.

As a result, Weinberg continued, “governments are able to claim balanced budgets under modified accrual accounting for budgeted funds while excluding major long-term obligations such as unfunded pensions and treating borrowing as revenue, which materially distorts fiscal reality. At the same time, most deferred inflows and outflows, which are not true assets or liabilities but represent amounts pushed into future periods, distort governments’ current net position, revenues, and expenses and can even place investment losses on the asset side of the balance sheet, masking the true financial condition of government.”

Nowhere are the yawning gaps in government accounting standards more evident than the unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare. In its analysis of the federal government’s current balance sheet issued by the Department of the Treasury, TIA pointed to the fact that reported liabilities — which are bills taxpayers must cover with their hard-earned dollars — are dwarfed by the actual liabilities.

“One of the clearest signs of how disconnected federal accounting is from reality lies in the federal balance sheet itself. According to the Treasury Department, only $241 billion [in] liabilities for Social Security and Medicare are included in official federal financial statements. This is a tiny fraction of the real financial picture: Social Security carries over $50 trillion in unfunded promises, while Medicare’s unfunded obligations exceed $60 trillion,” TIA reports.

The same TIA report points to a related factor. When Social Security was created during then-President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, critics challenged the constitutionality of the government benefit. The Supreme Court in Helvering v. Davis upheld the program in 1937 under the General Welfare clause of the Constitution. In other words, citizens do not have a legal right to Social Security benefits because it is a welfare initiative provided at the government’s discretion, and the government always retains the option of changing the benefit amount, including reducing it or eliminating it entirely. Put another way, the federal government has promised that more than $50 trillion in Social Security benefits will be paid in the future, but officials reserve the right to renege on those promises — and beneficiaries will be without recourse.

The situation is even more dire at the state and municipal levels where government employee pensions, including those of law enforcement personnel, are deep in unfunded liabilities. Weinberg told TWS that “Truth in Accounting’s first Financial State of the States research found that about 91% of state pension and other post-employment benefit liabilities were not reported on state balance sheets at the time, with only about 9% shown in official financial statements. That work highlighted how much of the true retirement obligation was kept off the balance sheet and helped drive changes in Governmental Accounting Standards Board standards that now require most pension liabilities to be reported on government-wide financial statements, significantly improving visibility even though important measurement issues remain.”

But there is still a loophole that allows hundreds of billions of dollars in pension and other unfunded liabilities to be buried in state and local government reports. That loophole is a modified accrual system that allows pension liabilities to be obscured or not reported at all on balance sheets.

Billionaire entrepreneur and former Department of Government Efficiency founder Elon Musk left the program in early 2025, but his assessment in a December 2025 tweet of the true extent of waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal budget dwarfed the GAO’s figures: “My lower bound guess for how much fraud there is nationally is 20% of the federal budget, which would mean $1.5 trillion per year. Probably much higher.”

If Musk is in the ballpark of how much is wasted on things like improper payments, one wonders if Trump will be able to eliminate it by the end of his second term in the Oval Office in January 2029.