AOC Audit: Senate Furniture Program Can't Verify $22.6M Inventory
Summary
The Architect of the Capitol's Office of Inspector General audited the Senate Furniture Program -- the office that buys, stores, and moves furniture for the Russell, Dirksen, and Hart Senate Office Buildings and other Senate facilities. Auditors sampled 138 furniture assets from a 10-year, 29,603-item inventory the Program itself valued at roughly $22.6 million. They could not physically locate 71 of the 138 -- 51 percent -- because the recorded location was wrong. A separate sample of 24 assets pulled from storage found 9 missing from the inventory system entirely and no lifecycle paperwork for any of the 24. Statistically, the OIG projects that pattern holds across 13,159 to 17,302 of all 29,603 tracked items.
Two systems, $5 million apart, tracking the same furniture
The Program runs on WebTMA, a maintenance work-order system repurposed to track furniture from purchase through disposal. It does not talk to the AOC's Financial Management System (FMS), the ledger that actually pays for the furniture. When auditors compared the two for the same 10-year population of active assets, WebTMA's reported total ran about $5 million higher than FMS's⧉ -- a gap the could not reconcile. Auditors used the WebTMA figures anyway, while flagging them as unreliable, because it was the only inventory the Program had to sample from.
View data as table
| Location accurate, item verified | 67 | Derived: 138 sampled minus the 71 with an inaccurate location |
|---|---|---|
| Location inaccurate, could not physically inspect | 71 | 51% of the 138-item sample |
Missing tags, flooded records, and microwaves nobody will ever issue
The paper trail was as unreliable as the locations. Three of the mislocated items were eventually found through staff recollection rather than records, and the separately noted 3 assets with tag numbers simply transposed in WebTMA -- one asset tagged S546262 was logged as S456262. When auditors tried to walk two individually selected assets through their full acquisition-to-disposal paperwork, staff couldn't locate the first at all, and the second's documentation had been lost when a storage room in the Russell Building's underground garage flooded in 2023⧉ -- the Program could produce photos of the flood but no incident report.
Site visits found a portion of the Program's leased basement storage at the Government Publishing Office unusable due to ceiling corrosion and falling debris, and dozens of new microwaves sitting at the Blue Plains warehouse at risk of going obsolete before they're ever issued. Furniture was also found unattended in Senate Office Building hallways because clients weren't following the Program's Return to Stock process and staff weren't consistently applying safeguarding measures.
None of this is new to the AOC's inspectors. The audit ties its findings to an earlier OIG theft investigation⧉ and to inventory-accountability weaknesses the had already flagged for FY2024. Its own FY2025 Statement of Management Opportunities and Performance Challenges⧉ cites the Senate Furniture audit by name as an example of a pattern the says runs across AOC jurisdictions -- even as a separate, organization-wide property sweep the same year got 58 pieces of excess property, worth $421,237.48, actually turned back in.
View data as table
| FY2021 | 1,024,823.1 |
|---|---|
| FY2022 | 1,003,298.3 |
| FY2023 | 1,091,442.1 |
| FY2024 | 1,203,763.9 |
- Auditors could not physically verify 51% of a 138-item sample pulled from a 10-year, 29,603-item Senate furniture inventory the Program's own system valued at roughly $22.6 million.
- A second, judgmental sample of 24 items found 9 missing from the inventory system entirely, and none of the 24 had documentation supporting their purchase, transfer, or disposal.
- The Program's two tracking systems disagree by about $5 million on the same 10-year population -- WebTMA (used for inventory) runs higher than FMS (used for accounting), and auditors couldn't reconcile the gap.
- Statistically, the projects 13,159 to 17,302 of all 29,603 tracked assets carry erroneous information, at 90% confidence.
- The made five recommendations; AOC concurred with four. It only partially concurred with a full physical inventory reconciliation, saying it cannot financially reconcile Senate furniture holdings that date back more than 115 years.
- The Program's own annual spending kept climbing anyway -- from about $1.02 million in FY2021 to about $1.20 million in FY2024 -- even as the audit covers those same years within its decade of unreconciled inventory.
Figures are drawn from the Architect of the Capitol Office of Inspector General's final report, Audit of the Architect of the Capitol's Senate Furniture Program (-AUD-2025-03, issued July 18, 2025), read in full via direct PDF fetch from oversight.gov, with a fresh Wayback capture confirmed live at read time. The report's listing is independently corroborated on the -run oversight.gov index, on a separate page, and the finding is separately cited by name in the 's own FY2025 Statement of Management Opportunities and Performance Challenges. A blind adversarial verifier, working from the primary documents alone with no access to this draft, independently checked every itemized fact; see verification.json.
The 49% accurately-located complement, the percentage conversion of the 's 13,159-17,302 projected-error range, the roughly 17.5% rise in annual Program spending from FY2021 to FY2024, and the roughly $546 average value of the book-to-floor sample are all this outlet's own arithmetic on the source document's own itemized numbers (methods and caveats in analysis.json); none of the four appears pre-computed in the source. This is a performance audit with a questioned-cost finding tied to inadequate documentation, not an allegation that any specific item was stolen -- the report notes a prior, separate theft investigation but does not attribute the inventory discrepancies in this audit to theft.
Sources(4) ▾
- Architect of the Capitol, Office of Inspector General, Audit of the Architect of the Capitol's Senate Furniture Program (OIG-AUD-2025-03) (2025-07-18) — The 's own final audit report is the sole source for every finding: the Senate Furniture Program's structure and staff roles within the Tenant Services Division; the FY2021-FY2024 annual spending table; the WebTMA-vs-Financial-Management-System cost discrepancy (~$5 million); the 29,603-asset, ~$22.6 million (precisely $22,594,367.36) 10-year sample universe and questioned inventory balance; the 138-item statistical 'book to floor' sample and its 71-of-138 (51%) mislocation finding, the 3 items recovered by staff recollection, and the 3 tag-number transposition errors; the 24-item judgmental 'floor to book' sample and its findings (9 assets not found in the Active Assets Report, 17 with inaccurate details, 24 with no lifecycle documentation); the 90%-confidence statistical projection of 13,159-17,302 erroneous assets population-wide; the storage-condition observations (GPO leased basement ceiling corrosion and falling debris, obsolete bulk-purchased items at the Blue Plains warehouse, unattended furniture in hallways); the five recommendations and AOC management's responses (full concurrence on four, partial concurrence on the physical-inventory-reconciliation recommendation, citing a furniture inventory dating back over 115 years); the reference to a prior theft investigation (#11-18-1); and the one-year Notice of Final Action deadline of July 18, 2026 set in the report's transmittal memo. oversight.gov · original document
- Architect of the Capitol OIG, via oversight.gov (CIGIE cross-agency index), Audit of the Architect of the Capitol's Senate Furniture Program (report listing) (2025-07-18) — The -run oversight.gov index independently corroborates report number -AUD-2025-03, the July 18, 2025 issue date, the publisher, the five open recommendations, and questioned costs recorded as $22,600,000 (the rounded figure oversight.gov's structured-data field carries for the report's precise $22,594,367.36 questioned inventory balance) -- confirming the PDF is the 's live, final report and not a stray or superseded draft. oversight.gov · original document
- Architect of the Capitol, Office of Inspector General, Fiscal Year 2025 Statement of Management Opportunities and Performance Challenges (2025-12-15) — Used to corroborate that the Senate Furniture Program's inventory-accountability findings are part of a broader, -flagged pattern: the AOC 's FY2025 statement to Congress cites the Senate Furniture audit by name under its 'Resource Waste and Accountability' management challenge, alongside a separate FY2025 organization-wide property assessment in which offices and jurisdictions turned in 58 pieces of excess property totaling $421,237.48. oversight.gov · original document
- Architect of the Capitol, Office of Inspector General, Contact Us / OIG Hotline (2026-07-21) — Used only to source the CTA hotline contact (cta.json); the same phone number and email also appear on the audit report's own cover materials. aocoig.oversight.gov · original document
Comments
Always open. Logged-in readers can annotate paragraphs in place.
The Architect of the Capitol's own Office of Inspector General⧉ went looking for the furniture the Senate Furniture Program says it owns. Auditors statistically sampled 138 items from a 10-year inventory of 29,603 assets the Program's own tracking system valued at roughly $22.6 million. For 71 of those 138 items -- 51 percent -- the recorded location was wrong, and auditors could not physically inspect them. A second, judgmentally selected sample of 24 items turned up 9 that weren't listed in the inventory system at all, and none of the 24 came with documentation supporting how, when, or for how much they were acquired.