U.S. Army Fudged Its Accounts By Trillions Of Dollars, Auditor Finds

[Purveyor]

Source: Reuters

By Scot J. Paltrow | NEW YORK

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.”

Disclosure of the Army’s manipulation of numbers is the latest example of the severe accounting problems plaguing the Defense Department for decades.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG

[MattP]

1. Big deal somebody mailed 3 little c's

[Scalded Nun]

2. This is also a problem with just throwing money at DoD.

They get way too much money, claim to get too little, and lack of planning results in money continuously going out the back door. They'll rake a worker-bee over the coals and ruin a career for a $10 error, but the senior staff can give away billions to contractor friends, squander more billions and get promoted.

You could cut their budget by over half and not impact readiness one bit.

[Dustlawyer]

3. Why don't they investigate all of the fraud?

If they dug a little they would see all sorts of ways the MIC gets money.

[cstanleytech]

4. And let me guess even if on the off chance there are any criminally prosecutions and convictions

they will be given a slap on the wrist at most even though this is fraud on a scale that makes the savings and loan scandal look like peanuts.

[First Speaker]

5. Hey--a trillion here, a trillion there...

...pretty soon, you're talking about real money...

[benld74]

6. Every year,,,every effin year

[Judi Lynn]

7. Thank you, Purveyor. n/t

[nitpicker]

8. Link to the summary and (at bottom) link to the report

http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2016-113.pdf