Any Loose Change Around?

When Comptroller General Lindsay C. Warren opened the RFC's books last fall for a routine audit, he threw up his hands in dismay. Things were in such a mess, he later told Congressmen, that no one could tell for sure how much money the huge lending agency had on hand, where its money was invested, how much it had coming in, or how much it owed. Last week, after a sharp rebuke from the House Committee on Expenditures in the Executive Departments, which upheld Lindsay Warren, the agency finally got started on the job of setting its records straight.

The job would not be small. Warren's specific complaints, dredged up in months of work by his General Accounting Office, filled almost a score of pages. Examples:

P: The Defense Plant Corp., an RFC subsidiary, had some $7 billion invested in war plants, but there was no way of telling how much was invested in any one project.

P: RFC field offices were not required to account for money they collected. Sometimes they kept money around for over a year before it was entered in RFC's records. (In April the New York office had $1,300,000 in checks lying around a cashier's cage.)

P: The accountants could not find out whether the rents on some war plants which RFC leased to manufacturers had been paid, or whether RFC made or lost money on its leases.

RFC Board Chairman Charles B. Henderson had pooh-poohed most of this. Said he: "GAO does not show that the Government has suffered any loss whatsoever. . . ." But the House committee admonished RFC to follow Warren's recommendations, which include a complete overhaul of its accounting system and the appointment of a comptroller to see that the system works.

More cautious than the committee, Congress, before it went home a fortnight ago, voted to limit RFC's lease on life to June 30. By that time it hopes to make a complete investigation on its own of the agency's operations.

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