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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWith $8.5 Trillion Unaccounted for, Why Should Congress Increase the Defense Budget?
by
Jacqueline Leo Follow on Twitter See Facebook Page
Editor in Chief Jackie Leo, former EIC of Readers Digest, Consumer Reports, and Editorial Director of ABC News Good Morning America, is an award-winning journalist and author. The Fiscal Times is her 4th start-up venture.
U.S. military is good at fighting wars, but it sucks at managing money. Partly because of its convoluted bookkeeping systems, $8.5 trillionyes, trilliontaxpayer dollars doled out by Congress since 1996 has never been accounted for.
That was also the first year that Congress passed a law requiring the Defense Department to be audited, which it has failed to do. In 2009, Congress passed another law requiring the DOD to be audit-ready by 2017. After spendingno wastingbillions on failed accounting software, the department is likely to miss that deadline, too.
Related: How the Pentagon Cooks the Books to Hide Massive Waste
So how does the military handle their books for the U.S. Treasury department? They cheat.
A scathing investigative report by Reuters in November 2013 described how an accountant at DOD in Cleveland would face the same monthly problem: Missing numbers, wrong numbers -- numbers with no explanation of where they came from or what they were for. To rectify the problem, the accountant was instructed to plug in false numbers in the DODs books.
More recently, we have sadly reported just a few of the mounting accounting problems at the Pentagon:
Pentagon Spends $1 Billion Destroying $16 Billion of Ammo. DOD purchased $16 billion worth of ammunition that it didnt actually need, according to a Government Accountability Office investigation that found much of the ammo became obsolete, unusable or their use is banned by international treaty.
$80 Million Iron Man Suit for Soldiers That Might Not Work. The DOD is pouring millions into a wearable weapon it calls the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) otherwise known as the Iron Man suit. It has a budget so far of $80 million in order to create a suit of armor that soldiers can wear while also being able to carry hundreds of pounds of gear Some scientists are already skeptical and say soldiers would never be able to move around in the heavy armorlet alone carry anything else.
$300 Million a Year Unaccounted for in Afghanistan. In the latest example of lax oversight, a blistering new report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) reveals the Pentagon isnt keeping sufficient tabs on the $300 million in tax dollars each year that are supposed to help fund the payroll of the Afghan National Police (ANP).
U.S. Weapons Worth $500 Million Vanish in Yemen. Pentagon officials cannot track the whereabouts of $500 million worth of military equipment the U.S. donated to Yemen since 2007 raising alarms that the hardware may have ended up with al-Qaeda or Iranian-backed rebels.
1 Billion Pad for Loose Bolts and Damaged Aircraft. Its bad enough that federal contractors hired to perform routine maintenance work on Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) airplanes dodged their work hours and shirked important safety requirements. Its even worse that they overcharged the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars for their work and agency officials didnt notice any of it.
$700 Million for Afghan Gem Cutters. The Taskforce for Business and Stability Operations, formed in 2010, was supposed to reduce unemployment and fostering economic growth in Afghanistan. But management issues and lax oversight are hampering its effectiveness--leaving millions of tax dollars vulnerable to waste.
Pentagon Didnt Report $145 Million in Improper Payments. The Defense Departments Inspector General estimated that had these claims been included in DoDs report, the actual amount of improper payments would be closer to about $213 million, or $145 million higher than DoDs estimate.
Pentagon Scraps 16 Planes Worth $500 Million for Mere $32K. After spending nearly half a billion dollars on 20 planes to outfit the Afghan Air Force, the Defense Department turned around and scrapped 16 of the aircraft for 6 cents on the poundjust $32,000, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has learned.
$900 Million More in Outrageous Military Spending. In the latest blow to the program, the Government Accountability Office released a scathing review of newly built ships that just joined the fleetships that together cost nearly $900 million more than originally estimated.
What should Congress do? Continue to blithely increase the defense budget when the department cant handle money? Call in Ernst and Young to do it for them? Or simply tell them they wont get another red cent until they figure out how to add and subtract.
At a time when the country is facing entitlement cuts and desperately trying to not just repair but invest in new state of the art infrastructure, shouldnt the agency with the largest federal budget justify what it spends and why? At the very least, if DOD doesnt pass an audit, it should be penalized
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/03/19/85-Trillion-Unaccounted-Should-Congress-Increase-Defense-Budget
Maedhros
(10,007 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)FWIW: That's called "Fraud" in my neck of the woods. I guess we shouldn't expect anything different when "money trumps peace."
Ichingcarpenter
(36,988 posts)Anyway the money is also tied to the corrupt banking system and the military industrial corporate complex..
I really think people need to see the global implications of this and how the trade deal will even make it worse for the world when the ones that corrupt it are making the rules to protect the petro dollars and an economy built on war
I suggest we need to wake up to what is really going behind our backs as this former HUD manager has
ALSO IF YOU HAVE FOLLOWED UNHAPPYCAMPER'S POSTS OVER THE MANY YEARS HE WOULD DOCUMENT SOMETHING ALMOST EVERY DAY FOR TEN YEARS THAT WAS FUCKED UP WITH THE MILITARY'S WASTE AND CORRUPTION.
99th_Monkey
(19,326 posts)Guy Whitey Corngood
(26,512 posts)leveymg
(36,418 posts)Seems they misallocated just about the entire defense budget every year since.
SamKnause
(13,114 posts)He announced that 2.3 trillion dollars could not be accounted for by the Pentagon.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)mikeysnot
(4,758 posts)College buddy's friend was killed on 9/11. I asked him if she worked in the Accounting dept.
He said yes, and they were moving in early.
yodermon
(6,143 posts)jeff47
(26,549 posts)Faux pas
(14,705 posts)winter is coming
(11,785 posts)progressoid
(50,012 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)off of the postal service, food stamps, education, EPA, etc.
MisterP
(23,730 posts)Sparhawk60
(359 posts)Nope, not going to happen. How can you blow people up if you waste all your money on health care, education, the infrastructure, arts, and scientific research? We need to continue to spend about one half of the world's total military spending. Those goats and tents don't blow them selfs up.
Do you really want to give up the joy of killing a goat by remote controlled drone strike JUST so you can live, longer, healthier, happier lives???
/sarcasm mode: deactivated
Rex
(65,616 posts)by Congess. However, now in 2015...the same people that own the MIC, own Congress and enough of it's critters to always get what they want. 8.5 trillion missing...yet it is the MIC so it gets a pass. The MIC is above all laws or personal repsonsiblity. Otherwise they would have never 'lost' 8.5 trillion dollars.
Response to Ichingcarpenter (Original post)
Adam051188 This message was self-deleted by its author.
Sherman A1
(38,958 posts)I think it is far beyond time for a straight balance sheet and some actual accounting from the 5 sided building.
Volaris
(10,278 posts)LuckyLib
(6,821 posts)mysterious "disappears" into the so-called infrastructure of the Iraqi government (read Swiss bank accounts) as well as the mullahs in small towns, we shouldn't be surprised. It's what we do.
tclambert
(11,087 posts)By which they meant none of the American officials thought to bring a pen and some paper on which to write receipts. Actually, they had paper--they could have used a few hundred dollar bills. As for writing implements . . . apparently all of Iraq's pens and pencils got blown up in the shock and awe bombing campaign.
And, of course, no one thought to bring a laptop computer with QuickBooks pre-loaded on it.
ErikJ
(6,335 posts)They got the guns.
B Calm
(28,762 posts)maindawg
(1,151 posts)We are insane.We spend 50 cents of every dollar on an imaginary foe to defend ourselves from. And then, we allow,50 cents of every dollar to be stolen, as a policy. Acceptable. We are , insane. You are saying that 25 % of our fed tax dollar is pissed away to the crooks who somehow have weaseled their way into our pockets. Into all of our pockets.
Why is this not a bi partisan issue?
hmmm
BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)Because administrations change, but the MIC is FOREVERRRRRRRRRRRR
F4lconF16
(3,747 posts)They are dedicated to maintaining corporate power as thoroughly as the Republican party is, only they're not insane fascist theocratic hate-filled nightmares.
BrotherIvan
(9,126 posts)It's the money. I've become so cynical in the last seven years.
F4lconF16
(3,747 posts)It's been a slow and steady decline into cynicism since I first started reading the newspaper 3 years ago.
Thank goddess for socialism. I've been working with the ISO in Seattle, and they're a good bunch of people. It gives me hope that there's another way. We're not going to last long, otherwise, and if we do it'll be some hellish dystopian Randian world.
SomethingFishy
(4,876 posts)of crazy military projects that we spent billions on that never saw the light of day. It's aged a little but still hits the mark.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)Add it up. From 1996 to 2015 the US spent an estimated $10.1 trillion on the defense-budget.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Sometimes America sucks.
think
(11,641 posts)mopinko
(70,330 posts)of afghanistan right now. he claims soldiers are bringing them back with them, shipping them out, and otherwise making a lot of money off this.
wonder if those rock cutters are being used by personnel over there.
he says no small part of it is people who can now just pick them up after ied explosions and bombings. but that little item caught my eye.
mopinko
(70,330 posts)what ever happened to all the stuff that was going to come out of abramoff's testimony, and duncan hunter's testimony?
find the brass plague contracts. find the stuff that is going in the front door and straight out the back door. ollie north and richard secord anyone?
what a pile of steaming bullshit.
HereSince1628
(36,063 posts)And the US military is perfectly positioned to once again participate in world trade in arms for drugs for money.
uponit7771
(90,370 posts)niyad
(113,823 posts)bullwinkle428
(20,631 posts)K&R.
valerief
(53,235 posts)knightmaar
(748 posts)Now stop asking questions.
F4lconF16
(3,747 posts)CrispyQ
(36,557 posts)It's all a disgusting scam.
What one trillion dollars looks like:
http://www.pagetutor.com/trillion/index.html
closeupready
(29,503 posts)Nice to know that, looking at each of my paychecks for any one given pay period, the Department of Defense is throwing away almost $154 of my money.