My understanding is that there was fraud/fudging at multiple layers, so that a single dollar gets counted multiple times because it moves without being accounted for multiple times.
So my takeaway is that the US Army is rampant with systemic fraudulent accounting at nearly all levels. Any money going in gets obscured multiple times and is impossible to trace.
I saw this yesterday and couldn’t quite make sense out of it. How can the army commit $6 trillion in fraud in a year when their budget is $500 billion?
Something is as wrong with the reporting as is with the army’s accounting.
Right? The Stargate program isn’t going to pay for itself.
And infringe on private suppliers’ kitchen services contracts? Fat chance!
It would also pay the Army’s budget for over 10 years. The same missing money is being counted repeatedly, inflating the figure at least 100 times. Still a lot of money, but headlines like this are about as honest as the Army’s accounting system.
It’s been pointed out many times that if the government were held to the same accounting laws to which it holds everyone else, they would all be in jail.
Yeah, blaming the guys with guns is like blaming the Walmart greeters for Walmart’s corporate shenanigans. They just fucking work there.
True, true. Having been one of the ones with the gun the most I was personally responsible for was a Gerber Multi-plier I slipped in the requisition form.
I was riffing on the old Barbie kerfuffle where talking Barbie uttered the iconic phrase and merely moved it laterally across Mattel Toy Lines to GI Joe. I suppose I could have searched longer for General Flagg or perhaps General Hawk, but it was all done quick and dirty, so first usable GIS was used for the base image.
What do you consider “public health care”? Because the budget for social programs is HUGE and eclipses the defense budget.
Not to say we can’t cut military spending or waste, but I don’t think one can claim we spend more on it than health care, unless you’re going to put some asterisks in the budget and take out certain programs.
I don’t know if fraud via the military budget is easier than the healthcare one or not, but considering medicare knew about the scooter chair fraud rings and were powerless to stop them for 15 YEARS doesn’t bode well.
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/year_spending_2016USbn_17bs2n#usgs302
Yeah, I am not sure I understand how the figure was arrived at either. I am sure there is a logical reason for the headline grabbing number. Someone will probably make a concise graphic novel-esque explanation for us dummies soon.
This was interesting:
“The spokesman downplayed the significance of the improper changes, which he said net out to $62.4 billion.”
So, they’re basically saying they’re still 10% off. Can you imagine losing 10% of your yearly budget? Nutso.
"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. In many instances this daisy-chain was repeated multiple times for the same accounting item.
The IG report also blamed DFAS, saying it too made unjustified changes to numbers. For example, two DFAS computer systems showed different values of supplies for missiles and ammunition, the report noted – but rather than solving the disparity, DFAS personnel inserted a false “correction” to make the numbers match."
Basically it sounds like one team lost ten million and made up a fake number. Then someone else repeated the same issue, counting the fake money twice. Or three times, or twenty times. Because the way contracting works, I’ll hire you to do a job and then add 20% on to charge the client for my time and energy spent overseeing you and checking your work and schedule. If I’m then subbed out, that’s another 20% on top, but that’s 20% on top of my 20%, so instead of 140% it’s 144. Add a third person and we’re at 178%.
I’ve seen gear skyrocket in price merely by having various people buy it on paper from one person to sell it to another person on paper. By going through six people’s hands the original price is tripled.
Right. A big fucking deal. So expect the media to double down on the poor social habits of athletes.
You can do it yourself at home. Put together your personal budget. Tack about 12 zeros onto a small expense. Then add a line item, let’s call it “budget credit”, with the same number lower down but in in the income side.
Voila! You’ve just made a several trillion dollar accounting error and covered it up.
Alternately, you could do it millions of times with random millions added or subtracted here and there to compensated for the millions of errors. Could be you’re are shitty at accounting. Could be you are hiding credit card debt. Could be you are hiding something else. Hard to tell what the hell is going on with so many numbers.
I don’t understand the article to mean “$6.5 trillion disappeared into the Army’s coffers”.
I think it’s more like there are $6.5 trillion worth of errors in their accounting; the defense department budget is still only (“only”) $573 billion. But with the books that scrambled, it is much easier for officials at various levels to misappropriate a portion of that $573 billion.
At least that’s my understanding of it.
Working as intended, then.
Because that’s exactly how money laundering is supposed to work.
How much does it cost to fund régime change in the ME, destabilise other unfriendly governments, provide slush funds for pro-US foreign politicians and so on? $64 billion sounds quite realistic when you take into account all the unofficial drains on military funding.
However, there is a general rule that when problems in a large bureaucracy can be traced to either fraud or incompetence, incompetence wins most of the time. The idea that someone lost a receipt or two, decided to inflate another item to compensate, and it just escalated all the way down the line is very attractive. Perhaps the entire $6.5 trillion is the ripple effect of losing the invoice for a single consignment of what the British Army used to call Army Form Blank (it comes in convenient rolls of a couple of hundred and is soft and absorbent.)
“The war, therefore if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that the hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact."
George Orwell- 1984.
Thank you <3
The article doesn’t say that, so I will stand by my statement that the reporting is lacking. And you, sir, are a troll. I said I was confused. You could source your statement and you could try to help rather than insult.
The DOD gets a lot more money than what is officially in its budget. It gets supplemental monies - trillions for waging war - and there are other “black” fundings that are secret. Very few people know how much money the the DOD gets.
And this is not simply accounting artifacts. There was about 18 billion+ in CASH money “lost” in Iraq alone in one year. 20 Hercules flights worth of cash. A pile of dead presidents easily seen from space. This is not about dollars being counted multiple times. This about the Military-Industrial complex running amok for decades. This is about very expensive evil done in our name, corruption bleeding our country dry.
