60 The Solari Report / 2018 Annual Wrap Up / Part Two of work and expense have been significant. I say this to underscore the importance of connecting the dots between the missing money and our retirement savings. Here is an excerpt from The State of Our Pension Funds in the 2017 Annual Wrap Up: “If it’s not a problem for $21 trillion to go missing from DOD and HUD and it is possible to come up with more than $20+ trillion to give or loan to the banks when there is no legal obligation to do so and when we can transfer trillions of the most valuable technology in the world to private corporations at zero cost to them and great cost to the taxpayers, I assure you that fixing whatever pension fund problem there is, is not difficult. However, the political will must exist and want to. That is the problem. If we can print money to give $20+ trillion to the banks and let $21 trillion go missing from the federal government, why is it a problem to print $5 trillion to fund the pension funds?” One of the reasons is because the pension funds are a SOURCE of revenues to finance the miss- ing money and bailouts. It is challenging when your source becomes a use. Where will you source the revenues instead? As the German finance minister explained at the G20 meeting in China in 2017, “The debt finance growth model is over. There are no changes that aren’t real reforms.” I would add that this also holds true for addressing the fraudulent inducement of American stu- dents with $1 trillion of student loan debt or the bankrupting of millions of Americans with an overly expensive health care system and suppression of economic health care treatments, among other items. One of the things that became apparent after Dr. Skidmore’s report was published was that investors, reporters, researchers, and interested citizens were not able to follow the story without a deeper understanding of the federal laws related to both monetary and fiscal operations in the U.S. government. Consequently, I commissioned attorneys Michele Ferri and Jonathan Lurie to research and publish a series of seven articles to make the federal laws in this area easier to under- stand. You can find their work in U.S. Federal Finances: The Law in Part 1 of this 2018 Annual Wrap Up and at our Missing Money website. In early 2018, the state of Tennessee audited Solari Investment Advisory Company, LLC. It was part of a three-year cycle in which the state audited all of the investment advisory companies in the state. Based on the hourly rates the SEC uses for such situations, the legal and bookkeeping costs of the audit exceeded our expected revenues for the year. Coming as it did approximately two weeks after the Solari Report site was destroyed and during a period when I was scheduled to be in Australia and New Zealand, the costs were particularly demanding. In addition, the pro- posals requiring us to adopt cybersecurity software, I believed, would badly compromise clients’ privacy regarding their private assets held outside of banks, insurance, and brokerage firms—in- cluding cash and precious metals. One concern was that the state had recently hired as their IT contractor a firm I have had personal experience with—and have found to be highly unethical in repeated dealings. Consequently, I closed the individual investment advisory company to focus on investment screens. Given the uncertainty ahead, anything I and the Solari team could do to reduce our regulatory requirements and risk was essential. The missing money issue came to a head in October 2018. DOD was struggling to complete an audit. Before they finalized the process—as they could not complete an audit—the Federal