What's in your vault? New York Fed audits its stash of gold bars

For decades, the U.S. government has stashed gold five stories beneath Manhattan in a vault under the Federal Reserve's fortress near Wall Street.

Or has it?

Some conspiracy theorists suspect that the billions of dollars' worth of bullion might have been looted in a dramatic heist, a la the movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance. Others claim that the gold has been used in a shadowy government transaction or swapped with gold-painted bars.

Now all of us may finally get some answers.

The federal government has completed an audit of U.S. gold stored at the New York Fed. The effort included drilling small holes into the bars to test their purity.

The Treasury Department has declined to disclose what the audit revealed, saying the results will be announced by year's end. But as one former top Fed official said recently, the testing may finally prove that "Goldfinger didn't sneak in at night" and take the gold.

"The calls for audits are saying, 'We don't trust the government for the last 200 years,' "said Ted Truman, a former assistant Treasury secretary and Fed official.

The Treasury's auditing operation, including the drilling, was a first for the New York Fed. The department's inspector general previously had audited and tested only gold it keeps under heavy guard at Fort Knox, West Point and the U.S. Mint in Denver. Those three locations hold 95 percent of the country's bullion.

In New York, about $21 billion in U.S. gold is locked inside the vault. It's stored alongside bullion from three dozen other countries and organizations such as the International Monetary Fund. All told, about 23 percent of the world's official gold reserves are stored in the central bank's vaults.