The usage of cookies and the collection of customer information by BullionStar is guided by our. And the vault has also been a setting place for several movies, the most famous being the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger when the titular character foiled a plot to contaminate thebullion. The target this time is the United States Treasury Assay Office in New York . Kooss analysis of the procedures used found its rigor wanting in several key areas. Fort Knox: "Glad Gold Is Safe!". The audit will be performed by a committee of auditors from the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) and the Department of the Treasury. Alaska, USA . *For all other publicly available audit reports (1980, 1981, 1985, 1986) its very briefly mentioned assay tests were conducted, presumably for one in every fiftieth melt. 15919 Avenida Venusto, Apt. Jun 5th, 2022 . Government-owned Goldare not in our collection." The WORST care homes in England: Interactive map reveals the lowest-rated 2,530 residences - so is there one Do YOU know your Adam and Eve from your Ruby Murray? President Reagan last spring demanding that this be looked into immediately. previous, Kids Find out what Uber drivers really think of you! He tweeted " Glad gold is safe! An overview starting from 1953: *In the 1953 report we could read 26 bars (0.00002 % of the total stash at that time) were assayed from bore samples. Small quantities of gold are removed to test the purity during regularly scheduled audits. Kids, Gifts for The New Year kicked off . Hisstatement 100 percent of the U.S. Governments gold reserves in the custody of the Mint has been inventoried and audited is impossible to confirm, as well see later on. Built in 1936, security access for the facility make it difficult to get access. Fort Knox, Kentucky is an Army base with more than one hundred thousand acres stretching across three counties. A second storage facility was built at the same time: . Conclusion. The Fort Knox facility was opened within the year, and took its first shipment of gold in 1937. A barrel is worth about $1,200 or $2.88 per pound which is 10-18 times the value of U.S. crude oil. Train fares will rise by 5.9% TOMORROW - but travellers can still get cheaper tickets if they buy them Why is Britain experiencing so many earthquakes? It was also the first visit by a serving US Treasury Secretary since 1948. Koos mainly provides unique insights about Chinese gold market. 211 votes, 25 comments. My assumption is, these assays from 2004 2008 are all assays authorized by the OIG from 1993 2008 and therefor cover 3 % of the gold stored at the US Mint. China Gold Import Jan-Sep 797t. 97 percent of the gold was checked and sealed in an audit that ended in 1986, and annual partial audits by a third-party accounting firm continued after that, he said. . So, what's really inside Fort Knox? The assayer is unknown and there was no assay report included in the audit report. Day trip: Steve Mnuchin and his wife Louise Linton touched down in Kentucky earlier on Monday prior to the Treasury Secretary's tour of Fort Knox. Fort Knox Gold: Once upon a time, the Fort Knox Bullion Depository was a vast storehouse for American gold. ( Kitco News) - Although he made this assumption nearly one year ago, the Donald's comments on gold at Fort Knox - or lack thereof - are making the rounds on Twitter again Tuesday. Jansen is a longtime gold insider and journalist reporting on, for example, the goings-on of the incipient Shanghai Gold Exchange (SGE). By gathering information from audit reports from 1974 1986 (the ones I could get my hands on) and statements made at the congressional hearing in 2011 well analyze our way through this. Not only were the vault compartments at the FRBNY exempt from being sealed, in addition, for an unknown reason assay tests were never performed at the FRBNY! By Everett Millman Gainesville Coins . 'It would really be quite a movie if we walked in and there was no gold. During this operations, the melt numbers and the number of bars in each melt are verified with an inventory listing, and one in fifty melts is randomly selected for weighing and test assay. As a result, the gold at the Bank [FRBNY] is considered unaudited. It basically coveredby 1986, 97 percent of the Government-owned gold held by the Mint had been audited and placed under joint seal. 2023 DISCLAIMER: All content within CoinWeek.com is presented for informational purposes only, with no guarantee of accuracy. Bevin, who said he collected coins as a child, compared it to 'seeing a leprechaun on a unicorn. I personally believe that rumor and the bulk of it has been sold off to the rich elites. Did The Dutch Central Bank Lie About Its Gold Bar List? "Glad the gold is safe!". It was decided to destroy several audit and assay reports and no less than 1,700 tonnes needed to be re-audited. Buy for Vault Storage in New Zealand No photographs were allowed, of course. All the golden coins that were handed in supposedly accumulated to the greatest gold pile on earth. On top of this, a decades worth (1993-2003) of Joint Seal inspections from the Denver and West Point depositories are not accounted for. . McConnell was part of a delegation of Kentucky politicians allowed inside the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox for the first time since 1974. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. The vault can withstand guns, blowtorches, and other incendiary devices. I left school at 16 with six GCSEs - and became a self-made millionaire. Republican frontrunner Donald Trump hinted at the idea that there just might be no gold in the U.S. Atthe congressional hearing in 2011 the IG stated to be 100 % certain all gold stored by the Mint was inventoried and audited, yet his department had accessto only a fraction (4) of all audit reports (13). Military/Civilian clock Examples of Civilian/Military time conversion. Part One, We use cookies to enhance the user experience and to analyse traffic. By and large, the vast majority of the verification is done by checking Official Joint Seals. ', 'I assume the gold is still there,' he said. Fort Knox is used to store a large portion of United States official gold reserves and occasionally other precious . Coin bars are assaying 899 to 901 per mille or 915 1/2 to 917 per mille,roughly 90 % pure, and these types of bars allegedly form the bulk of the US official gold reserves. You can change the usage of cookies in your browser. Thats everything we have, or are aware of. *Its likely 97 % of the audited gold by the continuing audits committee has not been assayed by an independent assayer. However, the documents released are incomplete and reveal the audit procedures have not been executed proficiently. The Treasury document says it would cost about $15 million to conduct an audit. His advice to me was to try at the General Accounting Office (GAO) and National Archives for more reports. Moreover, it showed a number of (at best) inconsistencies in how the mint conducts its bullion inspection for auditing purposes. Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) said he plans to introduce legislation next year to force an audit of U.S. holdings of gold. The auditors from the Treasury will be drawn from the Office of the Secretary, the Bureau of Government Financial Operations, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Bureau of the Mint. Click on the links for more information:Buy for Vault Storage in Singapore Lets recap what weve studied in the previous posts. Let me show you an example of Fort Knox. For the sake of simplicity, lets say I have both audit reports, 1980 and 1981. And the vault has also been a setting place for several movies, the most famous being the 1964 James Bond film, Goldfinger when the titular character foiled a plot to contaminate the bullion, Mnuchin said it was the first time Fort Knox opened its vaults to outsiders since a Congressional delegation and some journalists were let in to view the gold for the first time in 1974. In addition to facilities in West Point and Denver, the Fort Knox facility-known as the U.S. Bullion Depository -stands out for its reputation as an impenetrable fortress. The facility also featuresvideo cameras, motion detectors, and secret microphones, all set to pick up the presence of anyone or anything that doesn't belong. Few people have ever entered the vault,and while147.3 million ounces of goldallegedly exists inside, the accuracy remains in doubt. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Tiger Woods unleashes his lawyers on porn site after it Bannon is 'going to war' against Jared, 'crying Ivanka' and A whole hue world! I doubt an attempt to submitting a FOIA request directly to the Treasury Department will bring me anything; likely it will be a waste of time as I had already contacted all possible government departments separately, which could not deliver me the reports I was looking for despite none of them was unwilling to help me. While this sum is unreasonable, a crowdfunding campaign donated the total in less than 24 hours (strangely enough, the Mint never actually cashed Kooss check, and nearly all of the money was eventually refunded.). CoinWeek: Rare Coin, Currency, and Bullion News for Collectors, it should be clear that the Deep Storage gold has not been audited by professionals, but the precious metals have been verified by imbeciles., submitted a number of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, Kolbe & Fanning Booksellers Buy or Bid Sale #3 Today Through March 15, Selections from Atlas Numismatics New Ancient, World Coin Inventory, Lesser Known History of the US Mint in Saudi Gold and Other Tales, Bitcoins and Physical Cryptocurrency in Stacks Bowers Auction. They wrote me by email: Mr. Nieuwenhuijs our Office of Audit found: as well as GAOs 1974/1975 and 1978 reports. Currency, Shop All In the 1980 report we can read the audit procedures and a few other snippets (well quickly jump through) that help us understand how and where the audits were conducted: Audit procedures included (1) inspecting the joint audit committee seals used to control compartments containing previously audited gold; (2) comparing the records for each compartment inventoried to the identifying information on the gold bars; (3) weighing, from each compartment inventoried, at least one randomly selected melt in each fifty melts (a melt, averages about 20 bars cast from one crucible of molten gold); (4) removing samples from a bar in each of the melts weighed and having the samples assayed; (5) verifying the mathematical accuracy of all inventory records; (6) verifying the inventoried gold to the institutions records; (7) verifying the quantities shown by the institutions records to the control accounts for gold maintained by the Bureau of the Mint and to the central accounts maintained by BGFO; (8) placing audited gold bars in compartments under Official Joint Seal and audit committee control; and (9) reviewing and evaluating internal controls and security procedures. In 1936, Fort Knox military base was chosen as the site to build a bullion depository to store this gold. Although gold bars tested to be out of tolerance during a Fort Knox audit in 1977 at a sample size of 2 %, by 1998 the sample size had been further debased to 0.53 %. Facilities, Production The speculation has also been amplified by the degree of secrecy surrounding the reserves: Since the depository opened seven decades ago, the only time any member of the public has been permitted inside the facility was when members of the media were (however briefly) invited in on September 23, 1974. & Facilities, Shop All previous, back to US Mint Releases New Fort Knox Audit Documentation. Coins, Tours & Inside the lonely life of 'pavement killer': Neighbours reveal how 'childlike' disabled woman jailed for Tragedies of Everest: The adventurers forever frozen in ice after losing their lives scaling the world's 'Why the last-minute delay?' When thinking about these re-audits, threescenarios pop to mind: Why else wouldso much gold have been re-audited? According to the excel sheet the US Mint stores 312 tonnes in 9999 fine gold, spread over 3 depositories; Fort Knox 15 tonnes, Denver 100 tonnes, West Point 197 tonnes. Fort Knox is a U.S. army base in Kentucky, best known for the United States Bullion Depository which holds a large part of the U.S. government's reserves of gold. Then, the official response from the offline department to my request I received on May 13 as a PDF attachment (click here to view) oddly enough itsdated March 25, 2015 but not sent to me at thetime. When the mint finally produced the audit documentation, Jansen received 134 lightly redacted pages (rather than the estimated total of 1,200 pages). It is surrounded by an active U.S. Army fort, guarded by the U.S. Mint Police and protected by layers of security measures, including a blast proof 22-ton door, 16,000 cubic feet of granite, 4,200 cubic yards of concrete, 750 tons of reinforcing steel and 670 . Government-owned Gold, or my office, and placed under official joint seals. Daily free rolls! The controversial 'trauma expert' interviewing Prince Harry: Gabor Mat was warned by the Canadian A big Beckham birthday! The documents also include new details about Mnuchin's activities at Fort Knox, where the Treasury stores a stockpile of gold with a market value it estimates at $190 billion. McConnell said he had never thought about visiting Fort Knox before, but jumped at the chance when Mnuchin offered to take him. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed legislation outlawing private ownership of gold, and gave instruction to build the depository at . The Mint estimated that as much as one-third of the gold reserves were examined during this period. Meanwhile I was fortunate to find the 1981 audit report at the website The Golden Sextant fromReg Howe. The Eisenhower Administration Conducted The Last Audit Of Fort Knox. . Secretary Mnuchin's statements were not helpful. The government supposedly maintains over 8,100 metric tonnes of the yellow metal in its reserves, spread out across three main bullion depositories (for reference, the second-largest gold reserves owned by Germany total less than half of the U.S. stockpile). noting that it was "over 20 years" since the last one. By Patrick A. Heller. In response to a FOIA request the US Mint has finally released reports drafted from 1993 through 2008 related to the physical audits of the US official gold reserves. The gold vault at Fort Knox is "encased in 16,000 cubic feet of granite and 4,200 cubic yards of cement." Since there are far too many gold bars to count at once, the audit is carried out piecemeal and only small samples are taken for assaying. Remember, were investigating the audits of the greatest gold hoard on earth, which underpins the world reserve currency the US dollar. 12/ As of September 30, 1984, 99.9 percent of the gold stored at the United States Denver Mint had been audited under the initial continuing audit program. Lets have a look. . Reversal of this policy on a one time only basis came as a result of a series of peculiar events that resulted in a congressional demand for an audit of the bullion depository, and a first-hand viewing of the gold deposited there.