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Government should be able to keep its property

How do you lose a $1 million surface-to-air missile launcher? Two tugboats? Fifteen jet engines, including two valued at $4 million apiece?

Simple: Become Uncle Sam.

After two years of research, the General Accounting Office has released a 66-page study on federal government financial practices. GAO auditors uncovered ''significant financial systems weaknesses, problems with fundamental record keeping, incomplete documentation, and weak internal controls.'' The bottom line, according to the GAO, is that your government can't control its finances -- and doesn't know the whereabouts of billions of dollars worth of goods.

A whopping $636 billion in military equipment, including the items listed above, couldn't be accounted for by GAO auditors checking into the Pentagon's records, according to the report. That's only part of the government property that can't be accounted for, according to the agency.

There's worse to come: Auditors found that the Department of Housing and Urban Development makes about $900 million a year in overpayments through rent subsidy programs. And -- you've already heard this one -- the Health Care Financing Administration has made about $23 billion in Medicare overpayments.

In some cases, GAO auditors found that entire agencies, including the Defense Department, had accounting systems so inadequate that no clear picture could be obtained of how much is being spent, where certain equipment is located or even how much money is available.

Not to add bad news to bad news, but the GAO didn't even attempt to determine how bad is the mess involving Social Security. That program alone involves hundreds of billions of dollars in liabilities.

A government serving 260 million people -- and with the largest bureaucracy in the world -- can't be expected to keep perfect records or to eliminate all overpayments. Still, it would be nice if someone in Washington decided that surface-to-air missile launchers shouldn't be misplaced and that unscrupulous landlords shouldn't be milking taxpayers for $900 million a year.