U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds

[Eugene]

Source: Reuters

U.S. | Fri Aug 19, 2016 11:08am EDT

U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds

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.

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

[msongs]

1. the US MIC is the biggest welfare scam in human history. Our military needs a thorough audit nt

[underpants]

3. 9/10/2001 Rumsfeld actually brought this up

At the time there were 1,400 different accounting systems being used by the DoD.

[tonyt53]

4. The very reason why retired generals rarely make good businessmen. They don't understand economics.