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Want to Cut Government Waste? Find the $8.5 Trillion the Pentagon Can’t Account For

By Lauren Lyster

November 25, 2013 9:23 AM

If you thought the botched rollout of Obamacare, the government shutdown, or the sequester represented Washington dysfunction at its worst, wait until you hear about the taxpayer waste at the Defense Department.

Related: Obamacare's Unintended Losers

Special Enterprise Reporter Scot Paltrow unearthed the “high cost of the Pentagon’s bad bookkeeping” in a Reuters investigation. It amounts to $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for. (The year 1996 was the first that the Pentagon should have been audited under a law requiring audits of all government departments. Oh, and by the way, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with this law.)

Related: Dear Congress: We Want Our Money Back

We talk to Paltrow in the accompanying video about his findings.

Here are some some highlights he found among the billions of dollars of waste and dysfunctional accounting at the Pentagon:

The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known.
Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery.
The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or “plugs,” to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.
The accounting dysfunction leads the DOD to buy too much stuff. One example: the “vehicular control arm” to supply Humvees. In 2008, the DOD had 15,000 parts -- a 14-year supply (anything more than three years is considered excess supply). Yet from 2010 to 2012, it bought 7,437 more of these parts and at higher prices than they paid for the ones they already had.
The Defense Department’s 2012 budget was $565.8 billion. Paltrow points out that’s more than the annual defense budgets of the next 10 biggest military spenders combined. He tells us the Pentagon “almost certainly is” the biggest source of waste in the government based on his reporting.

Related: How Monsanto Controls the Government: Chris Parker

Looking forward, defense spending in the fiscal 2014 budget is set to be cut $20 billion from 2013 levels due to the sequester. In response, military officials, including Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, have raised an alarm over the impact of these cuts. Hagel told a conference the cuts are “too steep, too deep, and too abrupt.”

The Wall Street Journal reports Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James F. Amos told a House panel in September the “abruptness and inflexibility of sequestration…could erode our readiness to dangerous levels.”

Does Paltrow think that’s true?

“So much of that could be cut, that the impact of the sequester would be much less than [what] Pentagon officials are claiming.” He adds that officials are basing their budget requests on their own priorities, rather than firm knowledge of what’s needed because leaders don’t know what money is slushing around.

The good news is that because of arguments over the deficit and the budget, Paltrow sees signs that members of Congress are getting serious about waste at the Pentagon.

https://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/want-cut-government-waste-8-5-trillion-pentagon-142321339.html

It's nothing compared to how much Satoshi Nakamoto own in BTC , It just need a huge pump (like so huge) compared to the current price  ::)

US | Mon Nov 18, 2013 9:56am EST Related: U.S., POLITICS, SPECIAL REPORTS

Special Report: The Pentagon's doctored ledgers conceal epic waste


LETTERKENNY ARMY DEPOT, CHAMBERSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA | BY SCOT J. PALTROW


Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense's accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon's main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy's books with the U.S. Treasury's - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. "A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate," Woodford says. "We didn't have the detail … for a lot of it."

The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take "unsubstantiated change actions" - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called "plugs," to make the Navy's totals match the Treasury's.

Jeff Yokel, who spent 17 years in senior positions in DFAS's Cleveland office before retiring in 2009, says supervisors were required to approve every "plug" - thousands a month. "If the amounts didn't balance, Treasury would hit it back to you," he says.

After the monthly reports were sent to the Treasury, the accountants continued to seek accurate information to correct the entries. In some instances, they succeeded. In others, they didn't, and the unresolved numbers stood on the books.

STANDARD PROCEDURE

At the DFAS offices that handle accounting for the Army, Navy, Air Force and other defense agencies, fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure, Reuters has found. And plugging isn't confined to DFAS (pronounced DEE-fass). Former military service officials say record-keeping at the operational level throughout the services is rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.

A review of multiple reports from oversight agencies in recent years shows that the Pentagon also has systematically ignored warnings about its accounting practices. "These types of adjustments, made without supporting documentation … can mask much larger problems in the original accounting data," the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in a December 2011 report.

Plugs also are symptomatic of one very large problem: the Pentagon's chronic failure to keep track of its money - how much it has, how much it pays out and how much is wasted or stolen.

This is the second installment in a series in which Reuters delves into the Defense Department's inability to account for itself. The first article examined how the Pentagon's record-keeping dysfunction results in widespread pay errors that inflict financial hardship on soldiers and sap morale. This account is based on interviews with scores of current and former Defense Department officials, as well as Reuters analyses of Pentagon logistics practices, bookkeeping methods, court cases and reports by federal agencies. ....much,much,much more

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/18/us-usa-pentagon-waste-specialreport-idUSBRE9AH0LQ20131118

...didn't you know that the real rule-breakers are the guys who make the rules? ;)

Wasn´t it on Sept. 10th, 2001 that Don Rumsfeld announced that the Pentagon couldn´t account for 2.3 Trillion dollars? And he declared "a war on waste". LOL

And the next morning the Pentagon got hit by a friggin airliner, Which fortunately didn´t kill any of the brass only some lowly accountants which no doubt were scratching their heads over how to cook the books for their employer when they were so rudely interrupted. Isn´t life strange?

Coming up in the near future, you won't be able to buy a loaf of bread with that much. The guys who run the money are amazed that the dollar has held out this long.

You watch. When the old folks who are on welfare, and who believe in God, die, it will all come crashing down.

They say Ecuador is a nice place. But Ecuador uses the USD as their currency. So, how about the mountains in Panama, or the Caribbean? Personally I wouldn't trust SE Asia, and certainly not Russia, and Aussies are weak.

Where are you going to go?

:)

Are you going to use the completely enclosed rotary wing from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1081315.msg11552686#msg11552686 to get there?

:)

0. He's already "there" (BADecker), that's my point.

1. Your design does not account for Newton's third law: the rotor's enclosure would push against it with a force equal and opposite thereto if the both had positive mass.

Well, you could give my company a boost by telling them that my rotary wing works.    ;D

(See my updated post.)

No it wouldn't. It would work on the same principles that all the over-unity devices work. If the housing were large enough, and were shaped correctly, Newton's laws would be overcome.

(We should actually go to that thread with this stuff.)

:)

Anything with positive mass that contacts another something with positive mass exerts an outward force on that something, regardless of whether or not it was in motion. Thus, the mechanical attachments of positive mass that maintain the relationship between the rotor and its housing would exert a force against the rotor when the rotor contacts it. Newton determined that the force would be the negation of the rotor's force (i.e., "equal" and opposite).

Something with negative mass would exert the negation of the force's negation (i.e., it would coincide with it).

Nono, feel free to discuss it here if you like. No problem at all.

In other words, a standard wing doesn't do it by standard wing physics. Rather, the standard wing is simply a glorified propeller that happens to not be rotary, right?

:)

I think that most of this $8.5 trillion might have been spend on secret missions and assignments, just like the recent Kiev intervention. This spending can't be made public, as it will anger a lot many of the allies of the United States (The US regularly back stab its allies, although it tries its best to pull things under the carpet).  ;D

Major General Partridge: We have had some spectacular successes.
Congressman #1: Such as?
Major General Partridge: That's classified information!

The Pentagon Wars (1998)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDYpRhoZqBY

It clearly says Trillion, not billion.
$8.5 Billion = $8,500,000,000
$8.5 Trillion = $8,500,000,000,000

The difference is huge. If it were $8.5 Billion as you've said, then it wouldn't be much of a deal for country the size of the USA. The daily budget is just over $10B. http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/us_deficit/us_deficit.html


$8.5 Trillion dollars is really a lot of money.
Here you can find a visualization
http://demonocracy.info/infographics/usa/us_debt/us_debt.html

Oh.. my mistake. Sorry about it. But it is still confusing. I have heard that the US defense budget amounts to some $600 billion per year. And this $8,500 billion figure represents more than 14 years of total defense spending. No one really noticed this much money missing for such a long time? Difficult to believe all this. 

In it's really hard to believe, but I'm thinking this is not the limit.

Well, it´s 19 years of "accounting" actually. And Uncle Sam´s Mickey Mouse budgets always have megatons of "off balance sheet" items anyway. It was 2.3 Trillion that they couldn´t account for by 10th Sept. 2001 according to Rumsfeld and you have seen all the war scams since then.

Still hard to believe that no one actually conducted a comprehensive audit of these items in the past two decades time. If a honest audit is allowed to be conducted (the chances of which are quite low, as per my understanding), thousands of high ranking officials are going to be in trouble (including some of the big names).

Still wondering why this news is not being covered by the mainstream media.  ???

Wake up man, it´s fucking mob country where retards vote for homicidal maniacs, kleptocrats and psychopaths and have for decades. Mainstream media? Are you kidding?

F35, The Jet That Ate the Pentagon

by Wolf Richter • April 21, 2015

“We don’t know where all the money is going.”

The F-35 is the most expensive weapons program in history, with a total cost of $1.5 trillion, that has turned into a total fiasco.

So here is an 8-minute documentary (with some cool footage of the thing flying, landing vertically, etc.) to give you the willies about how the system works, and what’s wrong with it.

Note the term, “concurrent development.” It’s a key concept – and at the core of why this deal went haywire.

http://wolfstreet.com/2015/04/21/f35-jet-that-ate-the-pentagon-concurrent-development/

 ;D

....This is the second installment in a series in which Reuters delves into the Defense Department’s inability to account for itself. The first article examined how the Pentagon’s record-keeping dysfunction results in widespread pay errors that inflict financial hardship on soldiers and sap morale. This account is based on interviews with scores of current and former Defense Department officials, as well as Reuters analyses of Pentagon logistics practices, bookkeeping methods, court cases and reports by federal agencies.

As the use of plugs indicates, pay errors are only a small part of the sums that annually disappear into the vast bureaucracy that manages more than half of all annual government outlays approved by Congress. The Defense Department’s 2012 budget totaled $565.8 billion, more than the annual defense budgets of the 10 next largest military spenders combined, including Russia and China. How much of that money is spent as intended is impossible to determine.

In its investigation, Reuters has found that the Pentagon is largely incapable of keeping track of its vast stores of weapons, ammunition and other supplies; thus it continues to spend money on new supplies it doesn’t need and on storing others long out of date. It has amassed a backlog of more than half a trillion dollars in unaudited contracts with outside vendors; how much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isn’t known. And it repeatedly falls prey to fraud and theft that can go undiscovered for years, often eventually detected by external law enforcement agencies.....

http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part2

8.5 Trillion? that's too weak, kindly remind me of US total debt ? :^^

Ok watch this crazy numbers http://www.usdebtclock.org/
that figure which is almost reaching 62 trillion is nasty !!

(Sorry, that elucidation was [mostly] irrelevant prior this one.) Air pressure is the result of the "meanderings" of "air" molecules. In the case of an enclosed environment, the particles would "meander" "down" upon the enclosure as well as meander "up" unto the rotor - counteracting lift.

That's true. The American mainstream media is one of the most biased in the world (especially MSNBC, CNN, CNBC.etc). But what surprises me is the attitude of the normal Americans. 90% of them refuse to protest against any of this, despite knowing the fact that it is their hard earned tax money, which is being stolen.

This is also something that I was dazzled with. Quite a decent percentage of them are now aware of the spying that is being done on them, but they don't care? I guess describing them with the word 'sheep' is more fitting than ever.


Nothing surprising there. However this number shouldn't be disregarded at all. They have either lost this amount of money (showing signs of corruption) or they have been doing secret projects everywhere that nobody really knows anything about.

Well, they haven´t really lost 8.5 trillion dollars it´s more a question of extremely shoddy bookkeeping. They haven´t been able to square the books for like forever. The management must be eminently and chronically weak. And since it´s allowed to remain so for decades it follows that the mess is being used to hide both massive fraud and probably also some projects that can´t really see the light of day much.

Who´s really in charge?

http://www.jpost.com/HttpHandlers/ShowImage.ashx?id=225339&h=530&w=758

what you're talking about, satoshi hold at best 2M, which is 400M dollars, not even close to 8.5 trillion, and it does not matter in the case that you consider it short scale or long scale it is still far away form it


funny how besides their debt keeps going up, the usd is still the strongest fiat, there is nothing that can make it collapse at this point, if that huge debt isn't doing it

I don't think that most of the money was lost to corruption. It seems that most of it was spent on classified projects, all over the world. The United States have been doing all sort of dirty work around the world for the last 70 years or so. This includes bribing local dictators and politicians, and supporting terrorist organizations. All this require money.