Audit Reveals The Pentagon Doesn’t Know Where $6.5 Trillion Dollars Has Gone

This money most likely went on secret projects that the people will never hear about - at least not all the people. Kind of makes me wonder whether all the stories about massive infrastructure spending on secret installations is true.

originally posted by: jadedANDcynical
Just curious, how much money is there that theydo know where it went?

Add that to the missing funds and I'm curious as to how much in total they've spent.

What they know + what they don't know adds up to their budgeted amount. Basically, the Pentagon has been budgeted $6.5 trillion, that they know they spent, but they have no idea where they spent it.

originally posted by: Aazadan Basically, the Pentagon has been budgeted $6.5 trillion, that they know they spent, but they have no idea where they spent it.

Baloney!
They know what the money was spent on.
We aren't allowed to know what it was spent on.

That is an obscene amount spend on black projects...
*wanders off muttering*
"No space-based black triangles, my ass...."

a reply to: eisegesis

This is the kind of crap that makes my blood boil. Our government spends trillions of dollars on black budgets and the American taxpayer's money goes unaccounted!! In the mean time, U.S. citizens and self-centered politicians call for cutting programs that directly benefit its citizens, the elderly, the poor and the homeless. Many of these programs help provide healthcare, prescriptions, and the ability to afford an education. Yet these same people who complain about excessive government spending ignore the trillions of dollars our government secretly spends on the military industrial complex!

The American people shoot themselves in the foot every time they attack these programs. Just imagine if these trillions of dollars were spent on the American taxpayer to better their lives rather than on foreign aid, black projects, overseas conflicts and occupations, and numerous military bases around the world. Our government is spending billions to protect corporate interests overseas, not the needed interests of their own citizens here at home!

Just like the 23 trillion that was ignored now we have 6.5 trillion lost. The Pentagon employees better keep their eyes on the sky.

a reply to: Olivine

No, they really don't. If it were black projects they could just say that's what it was spent on and be done with it.

Tanks, jets and ships aint cheap to keep gassed up and operational.

Im sure atleast 1 trillion can be attributed to black op transportation.

About 50k everytime a cargo plane makes a move. If it isnt sanctioned it isnt recorded.

a reply to: AlongCamePaul

1 Trillion is coincidentally the amount that Bernie Sanders wanted to allocate towards fixing our crumbling infrastructure.

But I guess this is cool too...

Maybe they`ve spent some of it on funding ISIS.

Now that I'm home, I was able to look into the Reuters investigation a little deeper. The results are nothing short of what you'd expect from a bloated, conceded and unregulated government.

For the last twenty years, the US military has been unable to submit to an audit, openly disregarding federal law, while concealing billions of dollars of waste and fraudulent accounting.

Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,” Woodford says. “We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”

The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions” - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s.

Link

A senior staff member from DFAS said that supervisors were required to approve every "plug" on the balance sheet and that if the amounts didn't jive with what was spent, the Treasury would kick it back.

A lot of fraudulent data (or lack thereof), appears to stem from both, a complete disregard of one's duties combined with minimal oversight and/or the inability to meet the audit's deadline. This basically forced the DFAS to submit fraudulent data that was knowingly and intently entered in order to meet the Treasury's request.

In fact, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel stated: "The Department of Defense is the only federal agency that has not produced audit-ready financial statements, which are required by law. That's unacceptable."

I suggest you read the results of the investigation.

It's all just numbers in a computer
Probably proping up the stock market..

a reply to: eisegesis

It's called the black budget

a reply to: eisegesis

Watch your sources:

The Fiscal Times describes itself as an "independent digital news publication that reports on fiscal, budgetary, healthcare and international economics issues." Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, however, reports that the Fiscal Times is really a propaganda outlet created and funded by Wall Street billionaire Peter G. Peterson, a former Nixon administration cabinet member who has long used his wealth to promote cuts in Social Security and other government entitlement programs.[1] The Fiscal Times has been established as a limited liability company.[2]

www.sourcewatch.org...

And lookee here - an audit - in the pentagon from 2011:

The Government Accountability Office, a Congressional watchdog, said the biggest program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, accounted for $28 billion of that increase. Other systems also had significant cost overruns, the agency said, adding that the increases could force the Pentagon to cut the number of ships and planes it buys.

The auditors said many of the problems occurred because the Pentagon began building the systems before the designs were fully tested.

www.nytimes.com...

Now while I agree there is plenty of 'hidden' and 'unaccounted for' "expenses", stating that "The Pentagon has never been audited" is a blatant representation (to put it kindly).

When I worked in the 'military-industrial-complex' we were in constant audit mode. There has always been hidden money. This lack of regular audits of the military and it's contractors is a fairly recent 'business practise'.

That is why Brexit happened - total unaccountability by EU.

Accounts not signed off for years.

originally posted by: butcherguy
a reply to: eisegesis
I don't know why, but the thought of a 6.5 Trillion dollar robot army killing the crap out of pesky human peons entered my mind when I read the thread title.
Maybe it is a product of reading Georgia Guidestone threads?

The Secret Space Program seemed ab-so-lute-ly absurd the first time I heard it. And yeah, yeah, I watched Stargate SGI, religiously. I think I've seen every season a few times over. Eventually after connecting the dots, and more dots, and more dots... Suddenly it didn't seem so absurd.

This money may very well have been spent creating the X-301, F-302 & a Prometheus....well, the equivalent that is.

a reply to: FyreByrd

And lookee here - an audit - in the pentagon from 2011:

Umm...you realize this number is from the '90s or so and it just keeps getting bigger right? Every god damned time it comes up someone mentions a piss-ass audit of a few billion. We aren't talking about billions, we're talking about Trillions.

Last year it was 8.5 Trillion

Until every last dollar is accounted for, it hasn't been audited.

Not that I'd expect an honest audit to begin with. If it does finally happen it's prob cause they cooked the books so it could finally be "explained".

6 Trillion dollars !!!

What could you pay for with that? Refit every school sand hospital in the country ? Repave every road ? Give everyone of working age 30k each ? Wow wow wee wah, the mind boggles.

That's why they call you Sheeple because you can't do anything about it.

Well, maybe complain about it on ATS and throw big music festivals in protest.

I seem to remember an infographic for the 3.5 trill prior to 9/11 that put into perspective how much money was missing in relation to the total budgets for entire countries. Cant find it now but it did give a realy good display of how colosal the amounts involved were.

Im expecting to read about a terrible incident happening as a distraction any day now

a reply to: UKTruth

I used to think it was secret projects, black ops, secret space programmes, but the more I look at it the more I am convinced that it is sheer greed.

Some greedy creeps decided the money was there for the taking, and they took it.

There is no truly functional element of fiduciary responsibility in the government of the USA nor is there any mechanism to independently keep watch over these funds.

And although the same can be said for many governments that they conduct their business in the dark and all in power skim and steal what they can, it is shocking to see that the USA functions no differently than the worst sort of banana republic and operates with even greater levels of corruption than some of the southern European governments.

a reply to: Kapriti

but the more I look at it the more I am convinced that it is sheer greed.

Nah, check out the top 100 military contractors you eventually end up with Government of Canada, Berkshire Hatheway (Warren Buffet) and other companies. Even if it was split between all of them, that's like a full years operating budget. That's not even including bunk programs with cost overruns, delays and non-deliveries. On top of other stuff.

They also tacked on some crazy numbers here and there. Im guessing it comes from discretionary funds? It's shot up beyond all normal rates. Even if all 190,000 defense contractors were skimming that's 31,578,947 per contractor!

That's a lot of skimming. Not so much if each one is building secret components and pumping out secret projects, compartmentalized enough they don't even know what its for. Im not saying there isn't fraud or waste, it's probably part of the stuff on the books though. They tend to work harder on those to make them look good.