we keep hearing how the five sided fun house on the potomac needs more money even though they have no idea about where what they've spent so far has gone or is;
On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that
they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent
audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest single cost
center—the Pentagon receives two out of every three federal tax dollars
collected—after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The
firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled
with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a
reliable audit was simply impossible.
Deputy secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan tried to put the best
face on things, telling reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never
expected to pass it.” Shanahan suggested that the DoD should get credit
for attempting an audit, saying, “It was an audit on a $2.7
trillion dollar organization, so the fact that we did the audit is
substantial.” The truth, though, is that the DoD was dragged kicking and
screaming to this audit by bipartisan frustration in Congress, and the
result, had this been a major corporation, likely would have been a
crashed stock.
As Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, a frequent critic of DoD’s financial practices, said on
the Senate floor in September 2017, the Pentagon’s long-standing
failure to conduct a proper audit reflects “twenty-six years of
hard-core foot-dragging” on the part of the DoD, where “internal
resistance to auditing the books runs deep.” In 1990, Congress passed
the Chief Financial Officers Act, which required all departments and
agencies of the federal government to develop auditable accounting
systems and submit to annual audits. Since then, every department and
agency has come into compliance—except the Pentagon.
Now, a Nation investigation has uncovered an explanation for
the Pentagon’s foot-dragging: For decades, the DoD’s leaders and
accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional
accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress
and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military
necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual
financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth
of seemingly non-existent transactions—knowing that Congress would rely
on those misleading reports when deciding how much money to give the DoD
the following year, according to government records and interviews with
current and former DoD officials, congressional sources, and
independent experts…
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in the Nation magazine, please go to:
https://www.thenation.com/article/pentagon-audit-budget-fraud/
................. https://thiscantbehappening.net/exclusive-the-pentagons-massive-accounting-fraud-exposed/
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