Want to Cut Government Waste? Find the $8.5 Trillion the Pentagon Can’t Account For
By Lauren Lyster
Special Enterprise Reporter Scot Paltrow unearthed the “high cost of the Pentagon’s bad bookkeeping” in a Reuters investigation. It amounts to $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for. (The year 1996 was the first that the Pentagon should have been audited under a law requiring audits of all government departments. Oh, and by the way, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with this law.)
We talk to Paltrow in the accompanying video about his findings.
Here are some some highlights he found among the billions of dollars of waste and dysfunctional accounting at the Pentagon:
The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.
Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery.
The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or “plugs,” to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.
more
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/want-cut-government-waste-8-5-trillion-pentagon-142321339.html
Yet all the repubs can scream about are "Solyndra!!!" and "Fisker!!!"
= new reply since forum marked as read
There was a post here on DU, about 1 month ago, with a link to a lenghty article but I can't find it. Google "Pentagon" and "plugs".
- The accounting-system of the DoD is highly decentralized and nobody wants to give up his authority.
- Some of their systems run on computers from the 70s. And you can't run database-searches on those.
- If the accounters find something where the numbers don't add up, they have standing order by their superiors to cook the books with estimates or with numbers that were made up in hindsight (so-called "plugs"
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