Someone is not balancing the Army’s books very well. They had to do all kinds of ledger voodoo to make it look like the books are balanced.
The Army made $2.8 trillion in adjustments in 2015. There were so many adjustments that the books became practically worthless:
“DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.”
There is an entire $6.5 trillion adjustment with no receipts to back it up. The Department of Defense annual report said:
“The basic financial statements may have undetected misstatements that are both material and pervasive.”
The Defense Finance and Accounting Service said:
“The Indianapolis-based agency, tasked with paying all DOD military-related personnel as well as providing finance and accounting services, has abdicated its responsibility to track Pentagon spending and obligations, according to the IG’s report.”
This is the biggest chunk of government spending in our budget, and we don’t actually know how much the DoD is spending.
The 2016 budget for defense is $573 billion. That is more than half of the annual budget that Congress handles.
They need to be prepared for an audit by September of 2017.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, they lost 16,000 financial data files due to bad equipment and negligence.
Pentagon comptroller Mike McCord offered several possible reasons for the budget to be off. He said that it is not the Army’s mission to balance the books. He further said:
“It’s not the department’s primary mission, right? The primary mission is to defend the nation, fight and win wars. So the trick has been to get our culture to see this as a mission that needs to get done, even though it will never be the top mission of the department.”
This is absolutely ridiculous. Our government needs to clean this up; that money could’ve done so much good.
Here is a news clip about this issue:
Featured image by Keith Cooper via Flickr, available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.
