Special Report: The Pentagon's doctored ledgers conceal epic waste
Source: Reuters
...
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://news.yahoo.com/special-report-pentagons-doctored-ledgers-conceal-epic-waste-144950858--business.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
I could have been set for life selling bumble bee resistors, Mullard tubes, and gold contact circuit boards on ebay.
I DID manage to spirit away a set of infra-red barrier lights. I still have them. Part of the reason I wanted them was because prior, I had worked at the company that made them. 25 years now - they've collected dust in the garage. Of course, if I hadn't "rescued" them they'd be landfill now.
not including getting their...where ever there is. 
All of us (99%) have to be accountable for every penny we make. 
But a branch of the military? Accountable? 
...and let the Fed quantitatively straighten things out for them.
K&R
We christened our newest $5+ billion dollar destrpyer AND floated our $40 billion dollar USS Gerald R Ford.
From your link:
Plugs also are symptomatic of one very large problem: the Pentagon's chronic failure to keep track of its money - how much it has, how much it pays out and how much is wasted or stolen.
This is the second installment in a series in which Reuters delves into the Defense Department's inability to account for itself. The first article examined how the Pentagon's record-keeping dysfunction results in widespread pay errors that inflict financial hardship on soldiers and sap morale. This account is based on interviews with scores of current and former Defense Department officials, as well as Reuters analyses of Pentagon logistics practices, bookkeeping methods, court cases and reports by federal agencies.
As the use of plugs indicates, pay errors are only a small part of the sums that annually disappear into the vast bureaucracy that manages more than half of all annual government outlays approved by Congress. The Defense Department's 2012 budget totaled $565.8 billion, more than the annual defense budgets of the 10 next largest military spenders combined, including Russia and China. How much of that money is spent as intended is impossible to determine.
In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn't need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn't known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.