By Koos Jansen

https://www.bullionstar.com/

Since 2014 I’ve been investigating the alleged audits of the US official gold reserves. Of course my goal is to figure out if these audits are credible, or if they’re invented by the US government to silence the people that think gold has any value and forms the very material basis for a well-functioning monetary system.

My first post on this subject, A First Glance At US Official Gold Reserves Audits, published on March 27, 2014, was purely based on publicly available reports. Not surprisingly, all those reports together compounded to a logical story. The US government wouldn’t present anything that’s implausible at the surface. That first post was more or less a summary of the official narrative. After that post I decided to dig a little deeper.

According to the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), which is responsible for the audits, the vast majority of the US monetary stock stored at the US Mint had been audited by 1986, 241,247,820.61 fine troy ounces to be precise, as was said by Inspector General Eric M. Thorson during his Statement to the House Financial Services Committee on June 23, 2011:

… the Committee for Continuing Audit of the U.S. Government-owned Gold performed annual audits of Treasury’s gold reserves from 1975 to 1986. … by 1986, 97 percent of the Government-owned gold held by the Mint had been audited and placed under joint seal.

If this is true I would like to see those audit reports, I thought one day. My first Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted in 2015 at the US government asked for delivery of all audit reports drafted by the Committee for Continuing Audit of the U.S. Government-owned Gold from 1975 until 1986. Stunningly, the OIG couldn’t find all the documents – nor did the National Archives, the Government Accountability Office or the Treasury. The OIG only had three of the audit reports in question archived. Something was awfully wrong here.

The essence of auditing the US gold stock is to reassure the global economy that in any extreme scenario all dollars in circulation are supported by gold providing essential confidence and credibility. Once it’s proven the gold is there, why throw away the evidence? I wrote about this in my post US Government Lost 7 Fort Knox Gold Audit Reports published on June 2, 2015.

In my post from June 2015 I announced I would submit new FOIAs at several US government departments to get to the bottom of this. And I did, I’ve submitted countless of FOIAs at the US Treasury, US Mint and the OIG, next to asking for information through conventional channels like email and phone calls. Sometimes the FOIAs were not honored, sometimes I received very intriguing bits of information. What I found out, inter alia, was that in between 1993 and 2008, 84,671,927 ounces were re-audited. Meaning, several compartments that were sealed in between 1975 and 1986 had been re-opened to access the bars inside. And strangely, the OIG cannot give me a proper explanation for these re-audits. Believe me, I’ve tried to ask numerous times.

Why was this gold re-audited? Why were sealed vault compartments re-opened and re-audited? These are just examples of questions my research is focussed on.

My interest in the subject did not pass unnoticed at the US government. In recent months I could clearly sense a strong defense by all departments in concert. Emails are not being answered, phone calls are not being returned, questions in my FOIAs are dodged, and in my most recent FOIA an unreasonable amount of money was asked for reports the Mint Director’s Representative writes every year for “notifying the CFO of the completion of the verification” of the Deep Storage gold audits.

Through a FOIA submitted at the OIG late 2015 I obtained the Management Letter for the Fiscal Year 2004 Audit of the United States Mint’s Schedule of Custodial Gold and Silver Reserves March 10, 2005. I the management letter we can read:

5. Policy FIN-09, Deep Storage Asset verifications, paragraph 2v, and MD 8H-3 paragraph 6a, both include the requirement that the Director’s Representative submit a written report to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) notifying the CFO of the completion of the verification.

After reading this paragraph I thought maybe these reports by the Mint Director’s Representative would disclose valuable information. As the US government was barely talking to me anymore, I submitted a new FOIA request at the Mint in 2016 that stated:

Dear reader,

In the “Management Letter for the Fiscal Year 2004 Audit of the United States Mint’s Schedule of Custodial Gold and Silver Reserves March 10, 2005”, drafted by the OIG, it states:

“Policy FIN-09, Deep Storage Asset Verifications, paragraph 2v, and MD 8H-3 paragraph 6a, both include the requirement that the Director’s Representative submit a written report to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) notifying the CFO of the completion of the verification.”

I would like to obtain all these reports by the US Mint Director’s Representative to the Chief Financial Officer written 1993 – 2008.

The Mint replied this request would costs $3,144.96 dollars, because it would take forty hours to search the documents – as the requested documents are located at another facility – eight hours to review the documents and additional costs would be added to duplicate 1,200 pages of documentation. I think this is nonsense; it shouldn’t take forty hours to search these documents and I would be surprised if they actually count 1,200 pages. This is just another way of trying to shake me off.

However, thanks to Henry Young‘s advice on Twitter I decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe to collect the money! If we all donate a few bucks, who knows what comes out!

After I tweeted about the campaign it quickly went viral. The news was spread on websites such as TFMetals, GoldMoney, GATA and GoldChartsRus – among others – and within a few hours the funding was completed, which shows to me the power of our gold community! I was truly overwhelmed by everybody’s generous donations and support. As of this moment there is even more money collected than I asked for at GoFundMe (please stop donating!). The residual will be saved for when the costs appear to be higher or if they charge me for any other FOIA I’ve submitted. Naturally, I will publicly keep a record of expenditures in the comment section of my GoFundMe page.

Next for me is to transfer the money to the US Treasury and wait what they’ll sent back. If I’m offline for a weeks in September, that’s because I’m digesting 1,200 pages of dense jargon.

I will disclose a list with all the names (mostly Turdites) who have donated in the finished post on the audits of the US official gold reserves. For now, thanks everybody who donated and I’ll keep you posted!!

Koos Jansen
E-mail Koos Jansen on: koos.jansen@bullionstar.com

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 -- Published: Friday, 19 August 2016 | E-Mail  | Print  | Source: GoldSeek.com

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