Audit Reveals The Pentagon Doesn’t Know Where $6.5 Trillion Dollars Has Gone

[Firestarter]

That would be about half of the entire economic output of the United States for that year. The entire military budget for 2015 was $598.5 billion. The army (subject of the report) got $282.6 billion of that.

It appears very probable that the other parts of the Department of Defence (Navy, Air Force and Marines) did similar accountant trickery (fortunately a government department can't go bankrupt)...
I haven't been able to download the full report, but I read from the summary that this $6.5 trillion is only about the Fiscal Year 2015. In our Brave New World, it's not impossible to loan trillions on a budget of $282.6 billion, but unfortunately I haven't found any good research paper on this topic.

Here’s the summary of the report: http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/report_summary.cfm?id=7034

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.

[Firestarter]

This morning (in another internet cafe) I could download the 4 MB 26 July 2016 report without problems: http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2016-113.pdf

On Page 9, 10 (of the 74 page PDF) we can see that since 1991 the DoD has made “unsupported adjustments … to the financial statements” and has repeatedly promised to do better, but failed time and time again (and won’t be corrected until this year...):

The Government Accountability Office identified unsupported adjustments made to the financial statements as a material internal control weakness during its audit of the FY 1991 Army financial statements.6 The Army indicated in its FY 2008 Statement of Assurance on Internal Controls7 that this material weakness would be corrected by the end of FY 2011 with the deployment of GFEBS. However, the FY 2015 Statement of Assurance on Internal Controls indicated this material weakness remained uncorrected, and may not be corrected until third quarter FY 2017.

I would like to know details about the “unsupported” 138,887 transactions (97.6% of the total of 142,355) for $4.44 trillion (64.6% of the total of $6.87 trillion). The only “explanation” is that review procedures aren’t adequate (or something like that…); Page 14:

We reviewed a nonstatistical sample of 263 adjustments, totaling $2.2 trillion, of the 3,615 third quarter JV adjustments and 194 adjustments, totaling $2.3 trillion, of the 3,468 yearend JV adjustments that DFAS Indianapolis personnel determined were supported to verify that the underlying detail transaction level documentation was available.19 Table 2 provides the results of our review of a sample of the JV adjustments DFAS Indianapolis personnel categorized as supported. We determined that 236, totaling $2 trillion, of the 263 third quarter JV adjustments in our sample and 170, totaling $2.1 trillion, of the 194 yearend JV adjustments in our sample, were in fact unsupported because the adjustments.

The whole computer system is obviously filled with blatantly false data, also see Page 15:

Therefore, we determined that all 32 third quarter JV adjustments, totaling $0.9 trillion, and all 39 yearend JV adjustments, totaling $1.1 trillion, were unsupported.

What we see on page 20 is that the explanation we get for the ten thousands of missing records (I count 39,358 instead of “at least 16,513”) is something like “we just don’t know...”. These missing records came from another system, so could be found, but this wasn’t even tried:

In addition, the feeder files contained 603,036 records,27 but the Army RDT Management Report indicated that only 563,678 records were received. For example, one feeder file from the Standard Operation and Maintenance Army Research and Development System contained 19,307 records. However, the Army RDT Management Report noted that DDRS-B received only 10,685 records, a difference of 8,622 records. We brought this to the attention of DFAS Indianapolis personnel on February 11, 2016; however, they did not provide an explanation for the difference.

On page 25 we can see what measures are taken, instead of finding out what happened to the trillions, they started a project which identified 46 “root causes” of which 13 were corrected at the time of writing the definitive report:

The DASA(FO), responding for the ASA(FM&C), and the Director, DFAS Indianapolis, agreed, stating that 13 root causes have been corrected by implementing system change requests and process changes. The DASA(FO) stated that the corrective actions for the remaining 33 root causes are currently in progress and are being addressed with remedy tickets, training enhancements, and process changes. The DASA(FO) also stated that corrective actions could include system change requests, procedural updates, training, or a combination of the three. The Director, DFAS Indianapolis, stated that remaining process-and training-related corrective actions with DFAS Indianapolis control will be implemented by December 2016. He also stated that DFAS Indianapolis would not independently perform the additional process-, training-, and systems-related corrective actions but would continue to play an active role.

On page 35 Appendix C starts, this again shows that the balance sheet of the DoD is something of a joke. Table after table show that most of the “adjustments” are “unsupported”.
See for example Table 4. FY 2015 AGF Balance Sheet (in millions)


The Director of DFAS Indianapolis, agreed with most of the conclusions of the Inspector General, but argued “that 22 JV adjustments, totaling $1.4 trillion, were counted in both the FY 2015 third quarter and FY 2015 yearend amounts”. So instead of $6.5 trillion it would be “only” $5.1 trillion.
According to the Inspector General: “we correctly reported the dollar value of unsupported JV adjustments impacting the FY 2015 AGF third quarter financial statements and the FY 2015 AGF yearend financial statements”.

[Firestarter]

Here’s the summary of the report: http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/report_summary.cfm?id=7034

This morning (in another internet cafe) I could download the 4 MB 26 July 2016 report without problems: http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2016-113.pdf

Both the summary and the full report have been removed from Dodig.mil that looks like an official government site...
Here’s another story on this interesting topic: https://www.opednews.com/articles/Pe...60810-836.html

[timosman]

The report is available on archive.org - https://web.archive.org/web/20170830...G-2016-113.pdf

[Firestarter]

We can rest assured that the tax dollars are well spent by the Pentagon and the auditors!

It was announced as a major event: the first ever audit of the Pentagon, conducted by some 1,200 auditors.
The conclusion is that the Pentagon failed the audit, and is given another unspecified amount of years to resolve this!

Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan explained to reporters “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it”. Shanahan didn’t tell how much money was unaccounted for in the audit: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...rst-ever-audit

[Firestarter]

This audit cost a whopping $413 million, and now the Spentagon needs another $559 million to (not) fix their lack of administration of spending.
Caleb Maupin explains…

[Firestarter]

Finally a story with a reasonable explanation on what these “missing” Pentagon trillions actually mean...

On November 15, Ernst & Young and other accountancy firms announced that the Pentagon failed the first ever “audit”.
Asif Khan of the Government Accountability Office wasn’t surprised of this failure. He explained that the Pentagon has failed its audit over and over again but never “fixed” anything:

As a result of partial audits that were done in 2016, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines have over 1,000 findings from auditors about things requiring remediation. The partial audits of the 2017 budget were pretty much a repeat. So far, hardly anything has been fixed.

Here’s a 21 December 2017 audit report by the Inspector General on the Pentagon, that uses black spots to hide all of the interesting information (before President Trump, they didn’t heavily redact it): http://thenation.s3.amazonaws.com/pd...avy_budget.pdf

Mark Skidmore confirmed that the practice to insert adjustments into budget reports can be deployed in cases where receipts have been lost — in a fire, for example — or for a correction of a wrongly entered transaction into the system; “But those kinds of adjustments should be the exception, not the rule, and should amount to only a small percentage of the overall budget”.
In the Pentagon’s case it’s regularly much higher that the total budget....

Skidmore concluded that it not only trillions in 2015 were untracable, but at least $21 trillion of Pentagon transactions between 1998 and 2015. This $21 trillion includes only plugs that were disclosed in reports by the Office of Inspector General, which does not review all of the Pentagon’s spending.
In fiscal year 2015, Congress appropriated $122 billion for the US Army, but its financial records for that year included a whopping $6.5 trillion in “plugs”. More than 16,000 records that might reveal the destination had been “removed”. Let’s call that not intentional but an “accident”...
The “missing” money was literally hundreds of billions every year, and: $1.7 trillion in 1998, $2.3 trillion in 1999, $1.1 trillion in 2000, $1.1 trillion in 2007, $875 billion in 2010, and $1.7 trillion in 2012.

For decades, the Department of Defense (DoD) has been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately misleading Congress and drive its budgets up higher and higher. DoD has been making up numbers knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports in granting even more money to the DoD the next year.
The Pentagon receives 54% of all federal money in the US: $716 billion in 2019 (the current fiscal year), $692 billion in 2018, and $686 billion in 2017.
The fabricated numbers disguise the fact that the DoD does not always spend all of the money. Instead of returning the “unspent” funds to the US Treasury, as the law requires, the Pentagon then launders and shifts such moneys to whatever it wants. Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: is shifting unspent “one-year money” into a pool of “five-year money”. Federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money”...
They probably use this money to fund secret programs, like US Special Forces activity in Niger that only came to light when 4 US soldiers were killed.

Pentagon whistle-blower Franklin “Chuck” Spinney leaks to the press in the 1980s, about wildly inflated Pentagon spending, sparked public outrage.
Spinney explained recently:

They’re making up the numbers and then just asking for more money each year.

DoD routinely over-estimated inflation rates for weapons systems. When actual inflation turned out to be lower than the estimates, they did not return the excess funds to the Treasury, as required by law, but slipped them into something called a ‘Merged Surplus Account.

In that way, the Pentagon was able to build up a slush fund of almost $50 billion.

According to Spinney, the Pentagon has amassed “as much as $100 billion” over the years through its bogus bookkeeping maneuvers.
Spinney emphasised that the lack of bookkeeping are “business as usual. The goal is to paralyze Congress”: https://www.thenation.com/article/pe...-budget-fraud/
(archived here: http://archive.is/a1qIj)

[Firestarter]

Since the “war on terror” began in 2001, US wars are increasingly being fought by hired mercenaries instead of “normal” army soldiers.
For example, there are over 150,000 Pentagon-financed private contractors in Afghanistan today (75% of the western military personnel in Afghanistan).

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, of the $87 billion earmarked for the first year, $30 billion (34%) was budgeted for private contractors.
Over the 8-year US occupation of Iraq, the largest private recipient of Pentagon contracts was the subsidiary of Cheney’s and Bush’s Halliburton, Kellogg Brown and Root, which grossed $40.6 billion.

The Pentagon now spends over $300 billion annually on private contracts. That’s 8% of all US federal expenditure. Because the Pentagon isn’t properly audited, we can’t be sure how much is properly spent.
In 2011, the Commission on Wartime Contracting estimated that at least $60 billion of the tax money the Pentagon spent in Iraq and Afghanistan on private contractors from 2001 to 2011, should be classified as “fraud” or “waste”, $12 million per day: http://infobrics.org/post/29485/
(https://www.globalresearch.ca/privat...ars-us/5691670)

[Firestarter]

The Pentagon has repeatedly promised to do better, but under president Donald things have even gotten worse...

Last month’s General Accounting Office (GAO) report shows that the Pentagon made up an estimated $35 trillion in "accounting adjustments" to the General Accounting Office. That’s more than the size of the entire US economy, while the latest Pentagon budget is (only) $738 billion per year.
That $35 trillion is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017 (the first year adjustments were not tracked in this particular way). There were 546,433 adjustments in 2017 and 562,568 in 2018.

Accounting adjustments aren’t always wrong, but should be “properly supported”, because without evidence of why the “adjustments" were made, they could use it for anything they want, or use a money laundering scheme for the benefit of the crooks that control the US government.
The number $35 trillion is so high because with (the not supported) transfer of money, when it is transferred repeatedly it gets counted double, triple, quadruple…

According to a statement by the Pentagon “we have made significant progress” because the number of unsupported adjustments was reduced by “30%” and its value with “70%”.
The GAO estimated that at least 96% of 181,947 automatic adjustments made in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2018 “didn’t have adequate supporting documentation”…

According to politician Jackie Speier, the report shows the Pentagon “employs accounting adjustments like a contractor paints over mold. Their priority is making the situation look manageable, not solving the underlying problem”: http://archive.is/9EFkg

[Philhelm]

The 9/11 "missing $trillions" was the same thing. Because of poor accounting and lack of one computer/ accounting system, they could not tell what the money had actually been spent on- it was not a mountain of cash which vanished. It went to things like bombers and bullets and soldiers and paper pushers.

And embezzlement.

[Swordsmyth]

The Pentagon has repeatedly promised to do better, but under president Donald things have even gotten worse...

It's a good thing he ordered the audit.
They were probably worse all along but he is exposing it.

[Firestarter]

I always thought that Donald Trump’s campaign promise to build a border wall to protect the USA from all of those Latino Muslims was a complete charade.

Experts estimated that a border wall along 1,300 miles (2,100 km) would cost as much as $20 million per mile ($12.5 million/km), with a total cost of $45 billion, with the cost of private land acquisitions and fence maintenance making it even more expensive.
Maintenance of the wall could cost up to $750 million a year (not paid for by Mexico of course): http://archive.is/91bgj


I was surprised that President Donald actually abused his powers with the partial government shutdown for 35 days followed by declaring a “national emergency” about a year ago to get the wall funded.
Even though this violates the US Constitution for some reason this hasn’t been made into a valid reason for impeachment of president Trump: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1Q420N


Donald’s beautiful “impenetrable” border wall has already cost the US taxpayer $11 billion.
It can be knocked over with a brisk wind, cut through with a cheap saw and climbed over with a basic ladder: https://americasvoice.org/press_rele...-every-summer/
(http://archive.is/IxIov)


On 14 February 2020, Donald extended his US-Mexico border “national emergency” for another year.
I was also surprised that the billions of dollars in funds are diverted from the Department of Defense to fund border wall Construction: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...er-wall-115339


Now with the accounting practices of the Department of Defense being nothing but a sick joke it suddenly makes sense. This gives Trump and his cronies ample opportunity to launder the money and transfer it to offshore accounts!

This could also explain that Trump associates Jeffrey Epstein, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen and Roger Stone were locked up, as with these crooks out of the way Donald can take a bigger slice of the billions.
This could possibly also explain the huge amount of dismissed officials from Trump’s team: http://archive.is/bKeHV