What's Going On At The Pentagon?

[Karl12]

Did find this short vid quite funny.

Am sure it's just as bad in other countries but when it comes to 'accountability' where are all the accountants lol?

[Maxmars]

I have a theory...

The Pentagon was the perfect place to hide revenue and revenue commitments... clearly no longer....


That's why the political class created the DHS.... to hide money, to 'groom and execute' contracts...
the "cold war" bogeyman was gone...
and it's it a colossally difficult thing to replace...
no more giant 'enemy' could be used as an excuse to divert the millions being siphoned off for "black" projects and 'special needs.' 

The Pentagon was a convenient shell under which to hide the pea...

And given the laser-like efficiency of our government 'representatives' and their 'eagerness' to 'get to the bottom' of this example of their flaccid impotence, they will never "pass" an audit...  BUT  they will declare a huge "do-over" "we're starting from zero" point soon...  as soon as they figure out how much money to launder on the way out.

[Zaphod58]

It’s kind of a ridiculous story that no one believes because it sounds so ridiculous. But it’s the sad truth. Every program office uses their own accounting system. That data has to be imported to the program that keeps track of the main budget. The only problem is that all these different programs are not compatible with each other so it all has to be put in by hand. That leads to mistakes, and “receipts” get lost or are input wrong and filed away in some drawer in an office in the basement, with no stairs, and a burned out light. So when they do the audit things don’t add up, because someone saw a discrepancy, and went “Oh yeah, we spent that money”, and puts it into their “check book” to account for all the funds being spent, and we end up with knowing the money was spent, knowing where the money was spent, but not knowing how the money was spent.

[DontTreadOnMe]

It’s kind of a ridiculous story that no one believes because it sounds so ridiculous. But it’s the sad truth. Every program office uses their own accounting system. That data has to be imported to the program that keeps track of the main budget. The only problem is that all these different programs are not compatible with each other so it all has to be put in by hand. That leads to mistakes, and “receipts” get lost or are input wrong and filed away in some drawer in an office in the basement, with no stairs, and a burned out light. So when they do the audit things don’t add up, because someone saw a discrepancy, and went “Oh yeah, we spent that money”, and puts it into their “check book” to account for all the funds being spent, and we end up with knowing the money was spent, knowing where the money was spent, but not knowing how the money was spent.

Didn't they say the same thing about other government agencies...Social Security comes to mind.
What a ridiculous way to do bookkeeping.   

[Kwaka]

Has been a problem for a while, like the missing $2.3T the day before 9/11, 2001. The office tasked to find it also the office that got hit on 9/11 at the pentagon. It sends a message. Not the only fatalities when trying to work out how the money flows. 

The DOGE team got a lot of resistance from their work. Uncovered some of the fraud on the edges. As for dealing with the status quo, not much progress that the public knows about.

[ReturnofBroccoli]

Most government jobs with the DOD are contracted, is accounting not? If not, maybe it should be?

[UltraBudgie]

Ha, and I bet any time someone tries to "fix" the problem by introducing a single accounting standard, this is what happens:



Except even more complicated, because instead of actually switching over to a new single standard, each department just keeps the system they are using and makes a way to "export" the data to the new standard, if that. Each export method with its own inadequacies and bugs, of course...

It's almost like the accountants running the system don't want to obsolete themselves...

[Zaphod58]

Has been a problem for a while, like the missing $2.3T the day before 9/11, 2001. The office tasked to find it also the office that got hit on 9/11 at the pentagon. It sends a message. Not the only fatalities when trying to work out how the money flows. 

The DOGE team got a lot of resistance from their work. Uncovered some of the fraud on the edges. As for dealing with the status quo, not much progress that the public knows about.

Too bad the "missing $2.3T the day before 9/11" is a BS story. There was $2.3T unaccounted for, meaning they had the receipts for it, and they know they paid it (over many years), they just weren't sure exactly where it was paid. And it was reported in March of 2000 in the media. It was referenced by Rumsfeld on 9/10, but it was known about for a year and a half prior to that reference.

By JOHN M. DONNELLY
March 5, 2000 12 AM PT

ASSOCIATED PRESSWASHINGTON — The military’s money managers last year made almost $7 trillion in adjustments to their financial ledgers in an attempt to make them add up, the Pentagon’s inspector general said in a report released Friday.
The Pentagon could not show receipts for $2.3 trillion of those changes, and half a trillion dollars of it was just corrections of mistakes made in earlier adjustments.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-...story.html

[Zaphod58]

Didn't they say the same thing about other government agencies...Social Security comes to mind.
What a ridiculous way to do bookkeeping. [Image: https://denyignorance.com//images/addsmi...elpsos.gif]  [Image: https://denyignorance.com//images/addsmi...nghead.gif]

Yep, it absolutely is. It's the definition of insanity that we keep letting it happen over and over again.

[UltraBudgie]

But it is a bit of a coincidence that the missile (or airplane or whatever) hit and destroyed the accounting department at the Pentagon where the paper records that could be used to reconstruct the audit trail were stored.

Or is that a 9/11 myth? :shrug: