The Pentagon's Doctored Accounting Ledgers Conceal Epic Waste

[xchrom]

http://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-accounting-conceals-epic-waste-2013-11



LETTERKENNY ARMY DEPOT, Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (Reuters) - 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."



Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-accounting-conceals-epic-waste-2013-11#ixzz2l5iQMPez

[Enthusiast]

1. Kicked and Recommended. nt

[Glassunion]

2. And?

This is most likely true across the board for most of our government.

[philosslayer]

5. Nice Right Wing talking point

By and large our government works quite well, and doesn't need comments like yours which is fodder for those who want to cut it.

[Glassunion]

6. Ah...

So all of government works quite well... Except of course for the DOD. They are the only problem. I'm sorry to burst your bubble, but there is waste on almost all levels of government.

I'm not saying to cut anything beyond waste.

DOD - Cut the waste. Not just creative accounting. Why the hell are we buying aircraft that are being immediately delivered to the scrap yard?
HHS - Why are we paying medicaid benefits to doctors/hospitals that don't exist and in fact never existed?
IRS - Why don't they use simple accounting procedures such as... Oh I don't know... Maybe a ledger to catch unbalanced accounts?
USDA - How about we stop paying dead farmers? Just a suggestion.
FAA - Let's continue to pay for empty, unused airports.
GAO - Let's keep all of our nation's empty bank accounts open and pay the annual feel on them. It only cost us about 900 million a year to not store the money we don't have in those accounts.
USGPO - Let's bind and print out 4500 copies of the congressional record... Daily. Then lets throw most of the copies away. Then lets do it again.

I refuse to bury my head in the sand. You can call it a RW talking point or whatever. But to say that there is a department within the government that is completely free from corruption and waste, you are choosing to ignore reality.

[philosslayer]

8. I stand with Rep. Pelosi

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/09/22/pelosi-theres-no-more-cuts-to-make/

The government has been cut to death. Has it occurred to you thats one of the reason for the supposed "waste"? Not enough Government oversight?

[Glassunion]

9. And I stand with Obama.

"we must create a government that’s more competent and more efficient."

I'm a fan of lean management. How many programs do we need to perform a single task?

I'm not saying to cut funding, but to consolidate redundancies, trim management and let operations do what they do best... Operate.

Lack of government oversight has nothing to do with paying dead people, buying a $90,000 conference room table, buying a jet fighter that is going right to the scrap yard, that the department of energy should not be #2 on the list of agencies that waste energy, the IRS (jam packed full of accountants) should not have any unbalanced accounts, etc... This is just common sense.

My budget at work is rather small in comparison. But if I spent $24 on each piece of equipment that I was going to immediate recycle I'd be fired in a heartbeat. If our HR department paid dead people they'd be fired. My entire office was remodeled for over 100 people for less than the cost of one government conference table.

[elehhhhna]

11. iF YOU HAVE LINKS OOPS CAPS for all this

it would make a hell of an OP

[Glassunion]

14. I did have an OP many moons ago.

With links and whatnot. I skipped the all caps though.

[elehhhhna]

17. lol - repost it as an OP - I want to read it.

[Glassunion]

18. Was from quite some time ago on the old DU

Waste happens almost everywhere.

Post #6 has links to my sources...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1483267

[Revanchist]

16. You think the DoD wouldn't cut projects if they could?

Lawmakers from both parties have devoted nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer money over the past two years to build improved versions of the 70-ton Abrams.

But senior Army officials have said repeatedly, "No thanks."

It's the inverse of the federal budget world these days, in which automatic spending cuts are leaving sought-after pet programs struggling or unpaid altogether. Republicans and Democrats for years have fought so bitterly that lawmaking in Washington ground to a near-halt.

Yet in the case of the Abrams tank, there's a bipartisan push to spend an extra $436 million on a weapon the experts explicitly say is not needed.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/28/abrams-tank-congress-army_n_3173717.html

You want the DoD to spend with more responsibility? Let them have the power to make their own decisions first; if there is still a problem then you can blame the military.

[FarCenter]

3. K&R

I visited DFAS in Columbus in the mid '90s. It was an antiquated mess then. Apparently nothing has changed.

Long story and worth the read.

[Nuclear Unicorn]

4. Cutting waste would mean fewer, if any, furlough days not to mention a better force.

Dear Pentagon,

Help us help you.

Signed,
NU

[Blue_Tires]

7. We should bookmark this story

for the next time the teabaggers get into "deficit hawk mode" and try to chisel some more nickels out of the U.S. postal service...

[hootinholler]

10. This is nothing new.

The Pentagon has long been unauditable.

[Jesus Malverde]

12. Pretty stunned when I read this, the scale boggles my mind...nt

Same report on yahoo news.
http://news.yahoo.com/special-report-pentagons-doctored-ledgers-conceal-epic-waste-144950858--business.html

[Octafish]

13. ''Money trumps peace.'' -- George W Bush, Feb. 14, 2007

Uttered at a press conference, in which not a single of the cowed and callow press corpse saw fit to ask a follow-up.

I remember Cindy Sheehan tried to bring it to our nation's attention.

As for his Poppy: Bush Sr told the FBI he was in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.

[johnnyreb]

15. K&R

Looks like a very good article, thanks Business Insider. I will just add the below link to the mix also. I wonder what ever happened, and what cable snooze was chatting up last January.

Posted: 01/18/2013
The Government Accountability Office said Thursday that it could not complete an audit of the federal government,
pointing to serious problems with the Department of Defense. Along with the Pentagon, the GAO cited the
Department of Homeland Security as having problems so significant that it was impossible for investigators to audit it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/18/gao-audit-federal-government-defense_n_2507097.html