Posted on 08/20/2016 1:18:04 AM PDT by Enlightened1
The Pentagon failed to account for $6.5 trillion in its financial statement, a recently-recovered Inspector General’s report on the 2015 fiscal year said. It reveals the audit of the Department of Defense was “materially misstated.”
The army failed to provide “accurate, complete, timely and well-supported” documents that could have explained the use of trillions of dollars in quarterly and yearend adjustments.
The US military made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year, but could not provide anything that would detail what it spent the money on.
There were a total of 64,321 journal voucher (JV) adjustments made in the third quarter and 142,355 by the yearend, but only 7,083 of them were supported with detailed documentation of transactions.
The IG has also found that 16,513 of 1.3 million records were “removed” from the Pentagon’s budget system during the third quarter of the 2015 fiscal year.
“Without support for why these records were removed, we could not determine whether the records continued valid transactions,” the IG said, adding that the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis (DFAS Indianapolis) could not explain why the files were removed.
At the same time, data that Army General Funds (AGF) cited in its financial reports in both the third quarter and yearend “were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail,” which are necessary to confirm “accuracy, completeness and timeliness” of transactions, the Department of Defense Inspector General found.
(Excerpt) Read more at rt.com ...
Under Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting misstatements are a crime. So once again, the law is for the little people, but the government gives itself a pass. Nothing to see here, business as usual, move along. Look! Trump hates women.
I didn’t think the DoD had a budget anywhere near a trillion dollars.
General Washington didn’t properly return some cannons. They are figuring interest back before 1800.
Do you trust the US lame stream media more than “Russia Today”? I don’t.
My guess is that billions have been mismanaged, embezzled, stolen. Nobody’s watching. There needs to be a massive audit of the federal government, with US Marshals present, armed and ready with handcuffs.
This is RT - a suspect source. But perhaps the numbers weren’t supposed to be in dollars, but Roubles? There are 63 Roubles to the dollar, meaning that 6 trillion Roubles would be around $95 billion dollars. A still huge - but much more believable - number.
but they only received $500 Billion so how can they lose $6.5 Trillion ,Obama’s Common Core Math
The Pentagon knows where it went. It called compartmentalized, special access, black budget programs.
A trillion and a trillion there starts to add up.
I balance my accounts down to the last penny. Someone needs to answer.
I say we attach some federal pensions until some answers are produced.
>>”How do you lose over 6 Trillion dollars? Sounds to me either there is A LOT of looting going or the money is being sent somewhere illegally.”<<
Or it’s total b.s. (most likely)
Or an intrepid reporter doesn’t know trillions from billions, or millions. (possible)
I’ll go with total b.s. for starters.
Or Morsi’s?
Or Lewis Fuddy’s?
The numbers are correct, but it is weird accountant speak and not money missing. If one unit borrows $100 million worth of tanks from another and later gives them back and the paperwork is not to auditors liking then it gets recorded as $100 million in inadequate adjustments.
http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2016-113.pdf
“Those Conservatives who think military is underfunded are kidding themselves. Theres so much waste at the Pentagon that only Trump could fix”
Posters to this topic have only the fuzziest idea what they are talking about.
The chief errors:
1. USDoD accounting rules bear no resemblance to those for a private business.
Seemingly minor changes can affect results (loss or gain) more dramatically than anyone imagines. And the rules are under control of Congress and (less drastically) each service dept. This means politics (and all the things freepers love to hate): national, local, interservice, even intra-service. Things are done and changes get made quite unrelated to “reality” (however defined) to satisfy political goals no one knows. Or they know and cannot admit it in public.
The armed services are subject to the oldest bureaucracies in the nation. These institutions are generations ahead of all the rest, in understanding “the game” and in playing it. They play deftly, subtly, quickly. Sometimes they play well enough to pin the blame for poor results on some other party.
2. “Waste” does not enjoy a single, objective, rigorous definition everybody likes and agrees to. Not even the different individual armed services, nor particular operational units, can get anywhere near agreement.
3. Even if Items 1 and 2 did not exist we are constrained by this truism: the military is not a private for-profit business and it shares almost no goals nor missions with any private business entity. Attempts to trim the waste can produce only limited effects. The good intentions of the trimmers, no matter the intensity of their sincerity, matter not at all. In reality, the total situation might take a far worse turn if cuts aimed at reducing “waste” degrade unit esprit and capabilities.
4. Even if we could (by some miracle) cut out the waste, we are not guaranteed a cheery result.
Consider France’s Maginot Line in 1940: even if the builders laid every brick and mixed every bag of cement with perfect efficiency, even if the workers never took a single smoke break, even if every supply contractor had chiseled their bid down to the barest bare min, delivered results ahead of schedule, and voluntarily accepted delayed reimbursement, even if every cannon barrel and machine gun emplacement had been polished and oiled to within a millimeter of its life, even if every artillery shell and ammunition box was stacked with geometric precision, even if every bunker door clashed to sans any gap, even if every gravel pathway and rail bed was weeded to unholy exactitude, the French would have lost anyway.
Because focusing on all that efficiency would be solving the wrong problem.
I spent 29 years in uniform, 13 of them dealing with the very problems considered here (along with a great many other duties). Very little changed; growing frustrated about all of it was kind of like expressing annoyance with the laws of gravity.
My respect for Donald Trump grows with each passing day. But I do not rate his chances of stopping this sort of thing as very high. He may not even prove able to alter the trajectory. No matter how many “outside experts” he might hire.
I still call b.s.
To hit $2.5 TRILLION in a quarter they’d have to mishandle ALL of the budget for the quarter several times over. ALL of it. That’s so unlikely as to be unbelievable, so I just don’t believe it. I’d consider $2.5 billion in the realm of the possible, but not trillions.
That is what I read from a guy claiming to be a DoD auditor in another forum. He basically said it is accountant talk and in his estimation the amount of actual fraud occurrence rate is similar to Fortune 500 companies.
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