Federal Reserve Gold Audit Reveals Treasury Vault Discrepancies; $7.2 Billion in Unaccounted Assets Suspected, Sources Say
WASHINGTON, D.C. - A comprehensive audit of the United States gold reserves, conducted jointly by the Federal Reserve Board and the Treasury Department's Inspector General, has identified a discrepancy of approximately 7.2 billion U.S. dollars in the gold holdings currently stored at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. This represents roughly 1.2% of the total official U.S. gold stock, which is valued at over 600 billion dollars based on the current market price of the precious metal.
The audit, which was initiated in the first quarter of this year, compared the Treasury Department's official ledger of gold bars against a physical count and assay of the bullion stored in the nation's primary depository. According to a draft report obtained by this network, the investigation found that while the total weight of the bars matched expectations, the purity assay for a specific segment of the inventory deviated from Treasury records. 1,789 bars, primarily from a batch minted between 1987 and 1992, were found to have a fineness rating of 0.995, rather than the 0.9999 standard recorded in the Treasury's master data. The margin of error in this alloy difference, when calculated against the official record, accounts for the calculated 7.2 billion dollar discrepancy in asset value.
A senior official within the Office of the Inspector General, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that the discrepancy does not indicate theft or loss of physical gold. However, the official stated that the accounting error represents a significant material misstatement of assets on the national balance sheet. The Federal Reserve has placed a hold on any inter-depository transfers of gold from the affected batch pending a full reconciliation. The Treasury Department has announced it will launch a secondary investigation to determine how the impurity data was recorded incorrectly over three decades ago. No timeline