Back of a $20. Or the front of a $5?

WASHINGTON — A congressionally mandated audit of the Federal Reserve has uncovered wastefulness of 2.61” by 6.14” proportions. While sifting through the $77.4 billion in profits the Fed earned for the government in 2011, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that nearly all of it was printed single sided, with the fronts and backs on separate bills.

A broader search revealed that the majority of the 6.4 billion Federal Reserve notes put into circulation last year were printed single sided.

The massive waste of resources would have been discovered sooner if any Americans actually still carried cash. Most U.S. dollars are now held outside the country by Mexican drug lords and Iranian laundromats.

At a pretend hearing at the Starbucks where she likes to dress up and play Congress, Shadow Senator Jill Stratford (DC Statehood Green Party) observed, “As nice as it is of the Iranians to launder our money for us, it’s really the Fed that’s taking the taxpayer to the cleaners.” Each note printed costs 9.1 cents, and it’s 15 cents for color copies.

Even the electronic balances created in reserve accounts spit right in the eye of austerity. The audit revealed that the Fed has been rendering the balances using unitary instead of binary code.

Hans Whallendorf, an IT technician at Wall Street Bank of China, commented, “[Those] reserve balances… boy, I never saw so many zeros in my life!”

One auditor who asked not to be named for fear that he might be hit with a bailout divulged that the GAO was tipped off by a Mexican drug lord who got a hernia from lugging a doubly heavy suitcase stuffed with $100 bills across the border.

“The guy was on the fence about blowing the whistle until the border guards spotted him and pulled him down,” the auditor explained.

A representative of the Fed did not immediately return a phone call requesting comment, which was good because otherwise he might have rebutted the story.