Yahoo Money’ The Daily Ticker is confirming that is has uncovered a Reuters investigation that unveils $8.5 trillion – that is trillion with a “T” – in taxpayer money divvied out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for.

You understand that right. While Republican politicians dash to cut food stamps for the 47 million Americans residing in poverty – the largest sum in approximately 2 decades – Republican U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has the spirit to protest that $20 billion dollars in automatic sequester cuts to the enormous and secretive $565.8 billion Defense Department budget are ” too steep, too deep, and too abrupt,” all while the Pentagon and the Defense Department are overseeing huge fraud, waste, and abuse.

For anyone wanting to know, Reuters accounts that the D.O.D.’s 2012 budget totaled $565.8 billion, more than the yearly defense budgets of the 10 next biggest military spenders put together, including Russia and China.

In a meet with, Linda Woodford, an employee at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service – the Pentagon’s primary accounting firm – discloses to Reuters that she spent the last 15 years of her job basically “plugging in” fake numbers every month to balance the books;
“A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate. We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”

In the LEGITIMATE WORLD, that would be classified MASSIVE FRAUD.

Woodford’s participation in the fraud does not even start to scrape the surface. The record also shows that “a single DFAS office in Columbus, Ohio, made at least $1.59 trillion – yes, trillion – in errors, including $538 billion in plugs, in financial information for the Air Force in 2009.”

Yahoo Finance shows some added discoveries, which include;

1) 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.

2) 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.

3) 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.

Sit back and watch via The Daily Ticker

The Rabbit Hole Goes Real Deep, Find Out How Deep… HERE