The Marines pulled off another clean audit. The rest of the US military still hasn’t.

• The Marine Corps passed its third consecutive audit; it's the only military service to pass one.
• The rest of the US military has failed to pass any audit since they became mandatory in 2018.
• Officials say systems modernization efforts are helping untangle financial and logistics chokepoints.

The Marine Corps has again done what the rest of the US military has repeatedly failed to do with its finances — account for its money.

The Corps, the only US military service to pass a clean financial audit, announced its third successful audit on Monday.

The Department of Defense, which was recently authorized to receive a new annual budget of nearly $840 billion a year and could see a substantial increase to $1.5 trillion under the current Trump administration, has consistently failed to pass an audit since audits became legally required for the military in 2018.

Pentagon officials hope the military can get its books in order across the services and pass one by 2028.

"The Marine Corps' audit process enabled accurate global tracking and reporting of financial transactions, inventory of facilities, equipment and assets, and accounting for taxpayer dollars spent during the last fiscal year," read a Marine Corps release, "The auditors also tested the Marine Corps' network, key business systems, and internal controls."

The result reflects years of effort to modernize financial and logistics systems that have long been siloed across units, making audits agonizingly challenging, said Lt. Gen. James Adams III, the deputy commandant for programs and resources, during a media roundtable. Such bottlenecks have been a long-standing problem across the Defense Department and are a major focus of Pentagon reforms.

"We want to modernize our systems so they're digitally connected, so that we can do audits in the future that are controls-based," said Adams, who is set to depart his position soon to lead the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Historically, fragmented military networks have made everything from force-wide equipment tracking to financial oversight difficult, requiring tedious manual reconciliations. While the Corps still relies heavily on human review, officials say automation and artificial intelligence are already reducing the burden.

"Right now, we still take a lot of data and move it onto a macro spreadsheet that our accountants are reviewing, and that's just a lot of work," said Edward Gardiner, the assistant deputy commandant for programs and resources. AI tools can help flag discrepancies and pinpoint errors, he said. Officials pointed to one automation system that saved 20,000 hours of painful reconciliation work.

Auditors still found seven "areas of weakness" in the audit, a common feature even among organizations with clean audits, though Adams told reporters the Corps has prioritized fixes to those areas that pose the greatest risk to financial accuracy after its audits, rather than trying to eliminate all concerns at once.

"Passing our third consecutive audit is a direct reflection of who we are as Marines," the Corps' commandant, Gen. Eric Smith, said in a statement. "Discipline, accountability, and stewardship are not administrative tasks; they are part of our warfighting culture."