Posted on 11/30/2018 8:19:40 AM PST by TigerClaws
November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest discretionary cost center—the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations—after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.
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To make sure that fiscal year 2015 was not an anomaly, Skidmore and his graduate students expanded their inquiry, examining OIG reports on Pentagon financial records stretching back to 1998. Time and again, they found that the amounts of money reported as having flowed into and out of the Defense Department were gargantuan, often dwarfing the amounts Congress had appropriated: $1.7 trillion in 1998, $2.3 trillion in 1999, $1.1 trillion in 2000, $1.1 trillion in 2007, $875 billion in 2010, and $1.7 trillion in 2012, plus amounts in the hundreds of billions in other years.
In all, at least a mind-boggling $21 trillion of Pentagon financial transactions between 1998 and 2015 could not be traced, documented, or explained, concluded Skidmore. To convey the vastness of that sum, $21 trillion is roughly five times more than the entire federal government spends in a year. It is greater than the US Gross National Product, the world’s largest at an estimated $18.8 trillion. And that $21 trillion includes only plugs that were disclosed in reports by the Office of Inspector General, which does not review all of the Pentagon’s spending.
(Excerpt) Read more at thenation.com ...
Incompetence as an immune response.
The Swamp has broken some new ground here.
Wow. 21T would buy a lot of planes, ships and tanks.
Or a REALLY nice border wall.
That is our national debt.
From my sources through the years the military did not trust say, Obama, and money was hidden.
Just what I was thinking.
“—the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations”
Defense spending is more like 15% of the federal budget. What else is biased or misleading in this report?
Clinton. Bush. Obama.
This isn’t incompetence.
It’s by design.
Deep State PARADISE
That’s be some wall too!
IIRC, this is the nightmare Donald Rumsfield was discussing on September 10th, 2001
How do you lose an amount equivalent to our entire national debt, and no one noticed?
It isn’t just the Pentagon that needs to be audited. Try the Federal Reserve. That money had to be printed or at least invented in cyber-dollars. There is a whole other parallel economy out there we don’t know about.
The Black Budget is a Black Hole.......................
Remind me again what the average Marine Corp Corporal earns each month? You know, those guys kicking down doors in Iraq or getting hit with IEDs
A couple of decades ago, the county attorney (who in reality ran the county) of our small rural county told all department heads (hand-picked by him) to keep sloppy books, lose invoices, misplace files. All this in order to make the rampant corruption easier to get away with.
People have lost thier jobs for trying to fix it.
Now you know where Obastard got the billion dollars IN CASH he sent to Iran’s Mullahs, all gift wrapped and stacked on pallets for their convenience...............
Can you say,”Military Industrial Complex?”
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