Report: $8.5 Trillion Missing From Pentagon Budget

All I can say to this kind of ineptitude is that when I ran numerous projects of over $2M in size apiece, I was held personably accountable for showing my superiors where each and every dollar was and where it went. If I were to have found myself in a position where I had to report that even $10k was not to be found anywhere and I could not figure out where it went, I would have been fired on the spot and maybe indicted. Yes I understand that our federal government operates on much more pathetic standards of accountability than we citizens do, so perhaps the question should be WHY?

a reply to: Zaphod58

Pentagon has some 40 different accounting systems each with different data formats and not compatible with each other

Money is not "Lost" , its just that Pentagon can not account for how each dollar was spent and for what......

If government is so inept why are they so good at losing money?
Money is never "lost", it's in someone's accounts and they know where it is.
Americans still blindly believe this government somehow serves them.

All those trillions are now in the hands of the globalists who want to erase National borders and laws and institute their own rule over the whole planet. The Patriot Act, TPP, NAFTA, GATT, unlimited immigration are all parts of their plan to destroy our country and reduce people to chattel slavery.

I'm afraid the United States exists in name only.
The substance has been eaten out and the wealth stolen by legal fiat.

a reply to: firerescue

Which is what I've been saying. They know it was spent, they know what programs it was spent on, but their procurement system is broken beyond belief and needs fixing.

Yeah this is just accounting problems. Man I have seen this first hand. In particular when you have several different agencies working together like a unified command, the Navy, the CIA, the Join Staff and you have funding for an op and equipment used and shared. I watch the GAO try and settle a cluster among those groups once. They were auditing down to even rounds spent in training. Nobody knew who owned what, who had payed for what, who had kept what, who had payed for other incidentals etc. It gets even worse when you toss in private contractors etc. The money involved did not go missing but, you have things the Navy pay for that they can not account for because another branch or organization now has it. So it comes off as just a loss. It is one confusing mess and God help you when the GAO comes and you have accountants battling accountants.

a reply to: MrSpad

This doesn't even get into what was paid for by whom - i.e. if something was paid for above the micro-purchase threshold by someone other than a warranted Contracting Officer, then all of a sudden everyone is shaking their heads and pointing their finger at the other guy, saying - oh well the Captain asked the contractor to do that...

Procurement should be a valuable asset in protecting tax payer dollars from waste, fraud, and abuse. Problem is not everyone values what it should be, all of the systems aren't compatible, and many of the decision makers aren't connected to the money aspect because it isn't 'theirs', it is numbers in a budget, it is tax payers dollars. That makes value abstract - it disconnects the decision makers from valuing the cost of the projects they want to implement...