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The Pentagon Money Pit: $6.5 Trillion in Unaccountable Spending, and No Audit for the Past Two Decades
Dave Lindorff
What if the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services were to report that $6.5 billion in spending by that federal agency was unaccounted for and untraceable? You can imagine the headlines, right? What if it was $65 billion, or even $650 billion? The headlines would be as big as for the moon landing or the troops landing on Omaha Beach in World War II.
But how about a report by the Pentagon's Office of Inspector General saying that the Pentagon had $6.5 trillion in unaccountable expenditures for which there is simply no paper trail? That is 6,500 billion dollars! Have your heard about that? The report was issued back on July 26, but as of today it has not even been reported anywhere in the corporate media.
It's not that it's secret information, or hard to come by. The report is available online at the Department of Defense's OIG website. And as it states:
The Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management & Comptroller) (OASA[FM&C]) and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service Indianapolis (DFAS Indianapolis) did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter journal voucher (JV) adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend JV adjustments1 made to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation.2 The unsupported JV adjustments occurred because OASA(FM&C) and DFAS Indianapolis did not prioritize correcting the system deficiencies that caused errors resulting in JV adjustments, and did not provide sufficient guidance for supporting system‑generated adjustments.
In addition, DFAS Indianapolis did not document or support why the Defense Departmental Reporting System‑Budgetary (DDRS-B), a budgetary reporting system, removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million records during third quarter FY 2015. This occurred because DFAS Indianapolis did not have detailed documentation describing the DDRS-B import process or have accurate or complete system reports.
As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. Furthermore, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.
This bureaucrateze doesn't mean that $6.5 trillion has been stolen, or that this is money in addition to the $600 billion that the Pentagon spent in fiscal 2015. It means that for years — and $6.5 trillion represents at least about 15 years worth of US military spending — the Department of Defense (sic) has not been tracking or recording or auditing all of that money — what it was spent on, how well it was spent, or where the money actually ended up. There are enough opportunities here for corruption, bribery, secret funding of “black ops” and illegal activities, and simple waste to march a very large army, navy and airforce through.
Incredibly, no mainstream reporter or editor has seen this as a story worth reporting to the American public.
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Source: http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/3262
