Shoddy Pentagon accounting, trillions in errors

I came across this Reuter's report this morning and it's a real eye-opener. I think we're all aware of the existence of misappropriations, contract scandals, black budget projects, etc but the scope of systemic accounting malfeasance is staggering.

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.

Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China's economic output last year.

The dollar amounts, too, don't necessarily represent actual money lost, but multiple accounting entries for money in and money out, often duplicated across several ledgers. That's how, for example, a single DFAS office in Columbus, Ohio, made at least $1.59 trillion - yes, trillion - in errors, including $538 billion in plugs, in financial reports for the Air Force in 2009, according to a December 2011 Pentagon inspector general report. Those amounts far exceeded the Air Force's total budget for that year.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel declined to comment for this article. In an August 2013 video message to the entire Defense Department, he said: "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."

link to Reuter's report

So when the DFAS doesn't get good information, they just make the numbers fit. Why is Congress so lenient when it comes to the Defense Department's inability to keep accurate financial records? In 2011, we spent $711 billion on "defense," more than the next 13 countries combined (source ). Meanwhile, politicians have us at one another's throats over spending for programs that feed millions of Americans for a fraction of the defense budget.

reply to post by theantediluvian

That's why the government bailed out the banks. They know what it is like to have a toddler running your accounting department.

reply to post by theantediluvian

A
few trillion were noticed missing from the books over ten years ago, and we were told that would be fixed. Now we are supposed to believe it is happening still. Well, let's get real. With the many fingers of the Pentagon poked around in many different pies, covering the spectrum of graft, greed and black projects, we can't really expect balanced books can we? After all, at some point puffing the books can only be done so much. At that point, they hafta just throw up their hands and shrug. 'Course, nothing much is going to happen anyway. You think some auditor is going to be fired?

Besides the skids of 100 dollar bills shipped to Iraq and then Afghanistan, the black budget items are always in demand for more. Reagan's Space Defense Initiative (Star Wars) program was and is still a costly shadow endeavor that they would like you to think just melted away. They didn't develop and build the Space Force with NASA funds and those triangles we hear about so often on ATS are expensive.

I may bitch about the way they attempt to pull the wool over our eyes, but I'll support the building of fleets of the triangles as long as we don't go around provoking wars simply because we have that fabulous weapon.

Uh oh. The last time we got news like this, the next morning two planes hit the WTC Towers, a 3rd plane hit the Pentagon and the 4th ditched in a PA farm field.

reply to post by theantediluvian


Oh dear...we all know what happened the last time the Pentagon 'lost' $2.3 Trillion don't we!

Batten down the hatches, it might get bumpy.

ETA: Beat me to it Noreaster!

Yeah,

So, what buildings are housing this information, and are they susceptible to attack?

Deja-vu?

So what happens if the Defense Department straightens it all out and finds that it has a couple of trillion dollars surplus?

reply to post by JIMC5499


Ho-ho-ho.

That's a good one.

reply to post by NorEaster


Exactly what I was thinking..."Didn't we hear this on 9/10/01?"

2nd

Crazy , just nuts. To kick it all off the dow is up to 16000 now. WTF happend? It was like 7000 when the bailout happen and it doubled in tough times. Tough times for who I wonder. We need better puppet masters or just someone who will tell the truth for once.

Okay, for weeks I've been contemplating making a new thread about a subject related to this, but for some reason (probably fear of being strafed by debunkers) I hadn't yet.

What if, just what if, the Cold War was all a farce concocted by both the US and the USSR to hide the Black Project expenditures for the UFO secrecy costs and projects?

If you read Donald Keyhoe's books circa 1947-1953, the military on both sides had their hair on fire trying to figure out what the hell those things were, whether they were some high tech machines the other had invented against all their intelligence gathering and evidence to the contrary. There were reports that they were terrified of mistaking a UFO sighting for an incoming missile that could have started WWIII. What if both sides got together, verified beyond any doubt that neither side was responsible for either the visual or the radar sightings, nor for the estimated HUNDREDS of planes that were being downed in attempted intercepts over the first several years, and decided they needed a lot of money to do an investigation, and the only way to hide the expenditures was to pretend to hate each other's economic system?

It always seemed surpassingly strange to me that anyone in the military could think that amassing thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the enemy would be a sane way to fight an economic philosophy, or that for some reason Russia would want to invade us, especially right after WWII when they were as bad off as any of Europe was. It's obvious that for quite a long time, the Red Commie threat was a useful boogieman; what if it was simply a three decade long false flag, almost instantaneously replaced by 'terrorists' once the Soviet Union fell, and all the money being spent all these years on bogies was really spent in Black Projects that the vast majority of the Defense Department wasn't even privy to? Add in that if you were really going to fight an alien invasion, your only hope would be nuclear missiles, and Reagan's space-based defense system...

reply to post by JIMC5499


Hahahaha!! Funniest post ever!!!

reply to post by MysterX


A few years ago the local gas company shut my gas off because I was out of town and late on a payment. When I called to have it turned back on, the girl on the phone said "This can't be right. Can I call you back?" When she called back, she told me that I had a $1250 credit and that someone would be right there to turn the gas on. What had happened was that they never had read my meter, they were estimating my bill from previous records. When they shut me off they got an accurate meter reading leading to the credit. It wouldn't suprise me to see this happen with the DOD. The DOD is made up of hundreds if not thousands of Departments, each with it's own budget. If a full up audit was ever done, I think that you might find that many of these Departments have money squirreled away to make their numbers look good.

Remember the stimulus in 2009, they still haven't spent all of it.

reply to post by theantediluvian


WOW.

When you lie about a lie then lie about the truth then tell the truth about the lie you lied about it gets confusing.

Ask President Obama he'll understand what I'm saying.

JIMC5499
So what happens if the Defense Department straightens it all out and finds that it has a couple of trillion dollars surplus?

What do you think....we go to war.

"money laundering"

NorEaster
Uh oh. The last time we got news like this, the next morning two planes hit the WTC Towers, a 3rd plane hit the Pentagon and the 4th ditched in a PA farm field.

Very wrong actually, it was announced many times before that.

In fiscal 1999, a defense audit found that about $2.3 trillion of balances, transactions and adjustments were inadequately documented. These "unsupported" transactions do not mean the department ultimately cannot account for them, she advised, but that tracking down needed documents would take a long time.

Pentagon's finances in disarray By JOHN M. DONNELLY The Associated Press 03/03/00 5:44 PM Eastern WASHINGTON (AP) -- The military's money managers last year made almost $7 trillion in adjustments to their financial ledgers in an attempt to make them add up, the Pentagon's inspector general said in a report released Friday. The Pentagon could not show receipts for $2.3 trillion of those changes,

August 18, 2000 The DFAS centers processed approximately $7.6 trillion in department-level accounting entries to DoD Component financial data used to prepare departmental reports and DoD financial statements for FY 1999. Of the $7.6 trillion in department level accounting entries, $3.5 trillion were supported with proper research, reconciliation, and audit trails. However, department-level accounting entries of $2.3 trillion were made to force financial data to agree with various sources of financial data

January 7, 2001 The Defense Department's inspector general recently identified $6.9 trillion in accounting entries, but $2.3 trillion was not supported by adequate audit trails or sufficient evidence to determine its validity. Another $2 trillion worth of entries were not examined because of time constraints

www.911myths.com...

But do not let the facts get in the way of your conspiracy theory....

signalfire
Okay, for weeks I've been contemplating making a new thread about a subject related to this, but for some reason (probably fear of being strafed by debunkers) I hadn't yet.

What if, just what if, the Cold War was all a farce concocted by both the US and the USSR to hide the Black Project expenditures for the UFO secrecy costs and projects?

If you read Donald Keyhoe's books circa 1947-1953, the military on both sides had their hair on fire trying to figure out what the hell those things were, whether they were some high tech machines the other had invented against all their intelligence gathering and evidence to the contrary. There were reports that they were terrified of mistaking a UFO sighting for an incoming missile that could have started WWIII. What if both sides got together, verified beyond any doubt that neither side was responsible for either the visual or the radar sightings, nor for the estimated HUNDREDS of planes that were being downed in attempted intercepts over the first several years, and decided they needed a lot of money to do an investigation, and the only way to hide the expenditures was to pretend to hate each other's economic system?

It always seemed surpassingly strange to me that anyone in the military could think that amassing thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at the enemy would be a sane way to fight an economic philosophy, or that for some reason Russia would want to invade us, especially right after WWII when they were as bad off as any of Europe was. It's obvious that for quite a long time, the Red Commie threat was a useful boogieman; what if it was simply a three decade long false flag, almost instantaneously replaced by 'terrorists' once the Soviet Union fell, and all the money being spent all these years on bogies was really spent in Black Projects that the vast majority of the Defense Department wasn't even privy to? Add in that if you were really going to fight an alien invasion, your only hope would be nuclear missiles, and Reagan's space-based defense system...

You are a smart cookie!

soulwaxer

So basically, we have a moon base?
Nice, now i wanna join the army!
Ya hear me NSA? I'll keep those secrets for a good yearly wage and a trip to the moon.
Death to the Reptiles and their Grey slaves!

I don't get why this doesn't burn your average person more. Fill out the wrong line on a tax return and you might have people showing up to go through all of your records for years back, get penalties, possibly go to jail. Yet, same thing happens in government and people are kosher.