Tina W. Jonas

Defense
Tina W. Jonas
Undersecretary of Defense (Comptroller),
Chief Financial Officer

When Tina W. Jonas was sworn in as the Defense Department's comptroller in July 2004, she took on the most formidable financial management job in the federal government. Defense, with an annual budget exceeding $400 billion, is unable to produce an auditable financial statement. What's more, none of the military services is close to producing financial statements that can pass muster with auditors. Such reports are vital to measuring the fiscal health of institutions.

"It's a big job to get a clean statement," Jonas told the Senate Armed Services Committee's panel on readiness and management support last November. "There's nothing more that I would love to be able to deliver." Defense officials estimate they will not be able to present a clean statement until 2007. To David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office, even that is overly optimistic.

At Defense, Jonas is a key player in two major management-improvement efforts, the Financial Improvement Initiative, which is aimed at correcting reporting deficiencies, and the Business Management Modernization Program, which focuses on integrating business practices across the department.

Before coming to Defense, Jonas was the chief financial officer at the FBI, where she oversaw the bureau's $4.3 billion budget. She knew what she faced at Defense, however, because she served as the deputy undersecretary of Defense for financial management from April 2001 to August 2002.

Jonas was a staff member of the House Appropriations Committee's Defense Subcommittee from 1995 to 2001, and a senior budget examiner in the Office of Management and Budget from 1991 to 1995. She holds a master's degree in liberal studies from Georgetown University.