Army Fudged Accounting To Disguise Missing Trillions

[angelatc]

Time for another terrorist attack.

http://fortune.com/2016/08/19/us-army-accounting-misstated/


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.

[tod evans]

Keeping us safe one dollar at a time.......

[asurfaholic]

I'm sure the $400 hammers didn't help much

[AZJoe]

U.S. Army fudged its Accounts by Trillions of Dollars
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FtopNews+%28News+%2F +US+%2F+Top+News%29

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. …

the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” … 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.” …

The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department – far and away the biggest chunk of Congress’ annual budget – spends the public’s money. …

“Where is the money going? Nobody knows,” said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon ...

For years, the Inspector General – the Defense Department’s official auditor – has inserted a disclaimer on all military annual reports. The accounting is so unreliable that “the basic financial statements may have undetected misstatements that are both material and pervasive.” …

Jack Armstrong, a former Defense Inspector General official in charge of auditing the Army General Fund, said the same type of unjustified changes to Army financial statements already were being made when he retired in 2010. … “They don’t know what the heck the balances should be,” Armstrong said.


At first glance adjustments totaling trillions may seem impossible. The amounts dwarf the Defense Department’s entire budget. Making changes to one account also require making changes to multiple levels of sub-accounts, however. That created a domino effect where, essentially, falsifications kept falling down the line. …

rather than solving the disparity, DFAS personnel inserted a false “correction” to make the numbers match. DFAS also could not make accurate year-end Army financial statements because more than 16,000 financial data files had vanished from its computer system.

[phill4paul]

I'm sure the I.R.S. is all over this. That is their job. Right? INTERNAL revenue service. Their job is to keep an accounting of every government bureaucracy. Right?

[timosman]

I'm sure the I.R.S. is all over this.

I am also sure they have no idea where the money went. It is hard to keep track of this kind of money, it could be sitting in somebody's personal account and no one would be any wiser. :cool:

[phill4paul]

I am also sure they have no idea where the money went. It is hard to keep track of this kind of money, it could be sitting in somebody's personal account and no one would be any wiser. :cool:

Instead of targeting American taxpayers, if the I.R.S. were turned into a government bureaucracy that received 1% for every audit of Federal expenditures, that were misappropriated, or "lost" it would be the fastest growing, largest funded, bureaucracy in the U.S.
Civil asset forfeiture against signatories alone might be worth trillions.

[RJ Liberty]

I'm sure the I.R.S. is all over this. That is their job. Right? INTERNAL revenue service. Their job is to keep an accounting of every government bureaucracy. Right?

You've capitalized the wrong word: Internal REVENUE Service.

[phill4paul]

You've capitalized the wrong word: Internal REVENUE Service.

They could make bank. A government agency that only get's a profit from auditing other government agencies. There's REVENUE there. They could honestly add tens of thousands employees a year as they incarcerated other Federal employees and took "Civil" asset forfeiture. They could move into other government employees homes and drive their cars!

[RJ Liberty]

They could make bank. A government agency that only get's a profit from auditing other government agencies. There's REVENUE there. They could honestly add tens of thousands employees a year as they incarcerated other Federal employees and took "Civil" asset forfeiture. They could move into other government employees homes and drive their cars!

You are truly a visionary. This must now happen.