Gold Vault

The United States Bullion Depository is a fortified vault building located near Fort Knox, Kentucky which is used to store a large portion of United States official gold reserves, as well as from time to time, other precious items belonging to, or entrusted to, the United States of America. The United States Bullion Depository holds approximately 4,570 tons of gold bullion (147.3 million ounces [1]). This is exceeded in the United States only by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's underground vault in Manhattan, which holds approximately 5,000 tons of gold in trust for many foreign nations, central banks and official international organizations. Conspiracy theory A popular and recurring conspiracy theory, as alleged by Edward Durrell, Tom Valentine, Peter Beter and others, claims that the vault is mostly empty and that most of the gold in Fort Knox was removed to London in the late 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson. [2] In response, on September 23, 1974, Senator Walter Huddleston of Kentucky, twelve congressmen, and about one hundred members of the news media toured the vault. They opened a cell door which had been sealed with seven seals since it was first delivered there, over 30 years earlier. This revealed a room filled with gold, approximately 36,000 bars weighing over 11 million troy ounces. Radio reporter Bill Evans, when asked if it seemed like the gold might have been moved in just for the visit, replied that "all I can say is that I saw gold there" and that it seemed like it was always there.[3] Additionally, audits of the gold by the General Accounting Office (in cooperation with the United States Mint and the United States Customs Service in 1974 and the Treasury Department) from 1975-1981 found no discrepancies between the reported and actual amounts of gold at the Depository. [4]. However, the audit has been described as a peculiar process because it was only a partial audit done over an extended period of time.[5] The report states only 21% of the gold bars were audited as of 1981 (the audit report's issue date) and that the audit has "covered more than 212.7 million fine troy ounces of gold" which "represents over 80% of the total amount of United States-owned gold of 264.1 million fine troy ounces." [4] . A small amount of gold is removed for regularly scheduled audits to ensure the purity matches official records. [1] The theory continues to persist, however. In 2007, KPMG will carry out an independent audit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bullion_Depository