not complied with this law. (8) In 2005, the Department of Defense created a Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) Plan, overseen by a directorate within the office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), to improve Department business processes with the goal of producing timely, reliable, and accurate financial information that could generate an audit-ready annual financial statement. (9) Then Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said in a statement to the Defense Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives on February 25, 2016, I cannot ask for more taxpayer dollars for defense without being candid about the fact that not every defense dollar is spent as wisely or responsibly as it could be, and also being determined to change that and make our department more accountable. . (10) Then Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said in a speech on May 24, 2011: The current apparatus for managing people and money across the DoD enterprise is woefully inadequate. The agencies, field activities, joint headquarters, and support staff functions of the department operate as a semi-feudal system—an amalgam of fiefdoms without centralized mechanisms to allocate resources, track expenditures, and measure results relative to the department's overall priorities. . (11) The accounting problems of the Department of Defense result in widespread errors in pay that can be difficult to correct. Such payroll errors can impose hardship on members of the Armed Forces and their families. 4. Department of Defense spending reductions in absence of submitted financial statements or failure to achieve unqualified or qualified independent audit opinion (a) Definitions In this section: (1) The terms financial statement and external independent auditor have the meanings given those terms in section 3521(e) of title 31, United States Code. (2) The term qualified , with respect to the audit status of a financial statement, includes the characterization modified. (3) The term unqualified , with