Pentagon audit

[ramus]

Pentagon starting first-ever financial audit
By John Bowden - 12/08/17 03:41 PM EST

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/364001-pentagon-starting-first-ever-financial-audit


Pentagon starting first-ever financial audit
© Getty

Department of Defense (DOD) officials announced Friday that the agency would undergo the first full-scale audit in its history.

Defense Department Comptroller David Norquist said at a press conference that the audit would begin this month.

"It is important that the Congress and the American people have confidence in DOD's management of every taxpayer dollar," Norquist said.

The massive undertaking will examine every aspect of the Defense Department, from personnel and supplies to bases and weapons. At least 2,400 auditors will be tasked with spreading out across the department to examine the Pentagon's estimated $2.4 trillion in assets.

"With consistent feedback from auditors, we can focus on improving the processes of our day-to-day work," Norquist said. "Annual audits also ensure visibility over the quantity and quality of the equipment and supplies our troops use."

He added that beginning in 2018, audits of the Defense Department will be conducted annually as a measure to cut down on waste. Reports will be issued at the end of each year, on Nov. 15.

Norquist also spoke Friday about the danger posed by the looming possibility of a government shutdown. The House passed a two-week spending bill this week that will keep the government running as Congress attempts to pass a long-term spending bill before the end of the month.

"I cannot emphasize too much how destructive a shutdown is," Norquist said Friday. "We've talked before about the importance of maintenance on weapons systems and others, but if it's not an excepted activity, there'll be work stoppage on many of those maintenance functions."

"In the administration's budget, we requested additional money for munitions, and so we would like to increase the production of some of those munitions," he added.

Congressional leaders now have until Dec. 22 to pass another continuing resolution or larger-scale spending bill to avoid a shutdown.
------------------------

According to this report, on 10 September 2001, the longtime Republican Party apparatchik [official in a large political organization] Donald Rumsfeld suddenly, and without warning, held one of his first press conferences since his being sworn into office as the President George W. Bush regimes Secretary of Defense—and wherein he declared war on the Pentagon after his discovering $2.3 trillion was missing and unaccounted for. Less than 24 hours after Secretary Rumsfeld declared war on the Pentagon in order to discover what had happened to the missing $2.3 trillion though, this report notes, the United States, including the Pentagon itself, was attacked on 11 September 2001. DOES THE WORD DISTRACTION/COVER-UP, FIT HERE.

THERE IS A THREAD FROM MAY 27 2014:

US Bleeding $ & blood: Too Big to Audit? Pentagon multi-trillion budget under congressional fire (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?71765-US-Bleeding-blood-Too-Big-to-Audit-Pentagon-multi-trillion-budget-under-congressional-fire)

by Cidersomeret

[wnlight]

So, is this the beginning of another cover-up? Will they show us the amount of money spent on black projects, or syphoned off to the secret space program and other miss-uses? Or just plain graft? It will be difficult for the DOD to present a believable audit when they are already thirteen trillion dolars behind.

[Rocky_Shorz]

They are having trouble locating 44,000 Pentagon employees?

This is going to get messy. Is this the step before the Secret Space Program release?

15:30 mins in


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiLWFF__qiM

[dynamo]

I sure as heck hope it isn't the Federal Reserve Board doing the audit!
:ROFL: Could you imagine?
The fox auditing the wolf's actions!

[KiwiElf]

They are having trouble locating 44,000 Pentagon employees?

This is going to get messy. Is this the step before the Secret Space Program release?


;) maybe... it's because they aren't on Earth?... Maybe.... :sherlock:

[Michelle Marie]

They are having trouble locating 44,000 Pentagon employees?

This is going to get messy. Is this the step before the Secret Space Program release?


;) maybe... it's because they aren't on Earth?... Maybe.... :sherlock:

🎯Check IN Earth. Check Antarctica.⛄️

MM🌟😊🌟🐇🌟😊🌟

[Lifebringer]

I remember a few months back, the NASA guy saying they would have to be able to survive in space without aid from the planet earth and would have to have capacity to process minerals from asteroids and other planets that may be habitable. I watched the video. The NASA guy was named Charles Bolden or something like that. They are leaving the planet and hoping they never have to return to be prosecuted. They are abandoning planet. The video was on You Tube, but it was back in June or May when they started on this conversation to the "employees families to be on alert." Can't remember the title, but if you key in "NASA urgent alert to staff and families" you may be able to pick it up.
I was in my garden early morning and saw the 2 suns at sunrise. I was looking to see if the rats would be talking about jumping ship and voila! They were.

¤=[Post Update]=¤

Maybe they were "hybrid employees" and have gone back underground?

[waves]

We will NEVER have proof of any audit let alone that foxes aren't auditing the hen house. It's just smoke and mirrors to quash the rumblings and criticisms about Pentagon missing money and frivolous spending and of course the fake outcome to be reported is already predetermined, as it will be every year. Call me jaded, but back to my first sentence - we will never never really have proof of any so called results, let alone any true big picture of all spending where.

[BMJ]

The massive undertaking will examine every aspect of the Defense Department, from personnel and supplies to bases and weapons. At least 2,400 auditors will be tasked with spreading out across the department to examine the Pentagon's estimated $2.4 trillion in assets.

"With consistent feedback from auditors, we can focus on improving the processes of our day-to-day work," Norquist said. "Annual audits also ensure visibility over the quantity and quality of the equipment and supplies our troops use."

I used to work as an accountant for 15 years before becoming a carer, and from my experience I can say that this undertaking is about streamlining all systems and reducing wastage. (And also possibly also a legitimate means of removing some unwanted influence from the military).

It will be painful in the first few years at least, but in the long run the consequence will be beneficial for all in the military and it means money saved can be redistributed to worthwhile projects and supplies.


Any certified experienced auditor worth there salt can read the flows, documentation and money trails just like Hansel and Gretel following the pebble trail back home.

:ranger:

So as a heads up, if your dead wood collecting a paycheck you might want to think about retiring early because you will be found out and either given another job or retired.


Lastly I think this topic will be making headlines for the next 12 months and will make very interesting reading.

Then there is my personal bugbear, I would be interested to see how that bottomless pity of funding that is the F-35 fighter jet program fairs.

[Hervé]

The reason behind the audit... hopefully, there's also a firing squad having the back of that audit...

Shock report reveals Pentagon & HUD 'lost' $21 TRILLION-Enough to pay back Nat'l debt (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/audit-reveals-pentagon-hud-dont-know-where-21-trillion-dollars-went/)

Jay Syrmopoulos The Free Thought Project (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/audit-reveals-pentagon-hud-dont-know-where-21-trillion-dollars-went/)
Tue, 12 Dec 2017 18:22 UTC


https://www.sott.net/image/s21/438681/large/money.jpg (https://www.sott.net/image/s21/438681/full/money.jpg)


© The Free Thought Project



The Pentagon and HUD can't account for $21 trillion over just the past 17 years
- enough money to pay back the current U.S. national debt


A new report analyzing the budgets of both the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), found that between 1998 and 2015, these two departments alone lost over $21 trillion (https://solari.com/blog/dod-and-hud-missing-money-supporting-documentation/) in taxpayer funds.

The shocking report was authored by Dr. Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics at Michigan State University, and Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of housing. It notes that the missing funds are a direct result of "unsupported journal voucher adjustments" made to the departments' budgets.

According to an Office of the Comptroller report (http://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/documents/fiar/FIAR_Plan_May_2015.pdf):
"Unsupported journal voucher adjustments" are defined as "summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment [receipts, etc.] or are not tied to specific accounting transactions." The report notes that, in both the private and public sectors, the presence of such adjustments is considered "a red flag"for potential fraud.

As The Free Thought Project reported (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/audit-reveals-pentagon-6-5-trillion/) last year, the U.S. DOD, specifically the U.S. Army, could not account for $6.5 trillion in 2015 due to "wrongful balance adjustments."

According to a report by Reuters, the Army "lacked the receipts and invoices to support those numbers [the adjustments] or simply made them up" in order to "create an illusion that its books are balanced."

The DOD has officially acknowledged that its financial statements for 2015 were "materially misstated."

In an interview (https://usawatchdog.com/21-trillion-missing-u-s-government-a-criminal-enterprise-catherine-austin-fitts/) with USA Watchdog, co-author Fitts noted that the missing $21 trillion amounts to "$65,000 for every man, woman and child resident in America."

The amount of money unaccounted for is enough to pay back the whole of the U.S. national debt, which currently stands at roughly $20.5 trillion, and still have a half a trillion left.

Even more startling, the total amount of missing funds-$21 trillion-is most likely much higher in reality, as the data used for the report was incomplete due to the researchers being unable to recover complete data for every year analyzed.

Perhaps even more troubling than the total amount lost is the fact that fraudulent behavior from HUD and DOD seem to be the standard operating procedure. In fact, the accounting for these funds is so poor, that as Reuters notes, the Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) refers to the preparation of the Army's year-end statements as "the grand plug" - "plug" is accounting jargon for the insertion of made-up numbers.

For every transaction, a so-called "journal voucher" that provides serial numbers, transaction dates and the amount of the expenditure is supposed to be produced. The report specifies that the agency has done such a poor job in providing documentation of their transactions, that there is no way to actually know how $21 trillion dollars has been spent. Essentially, the government has no way of knowing how the Pentagon has spent the trillions of taxpayer dollars allocated by Congress for national defense.

In turn, employees of the DFAS were routinely told by superiors to take "unsubstantiated change actions" commonly referred to as "plugging" the numbers. These "plugs"-which amounted to falsifying financial records-were then used to create the appearance that the military's financial data matched that of the U.S. Treasury Department's numbers when discrepancies in the financial data couldn't be accounted for, according to a Reuters investigation (http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part2).

Furthermore, in 2015, DFAS was unable to accurately put together the year-end statements for the department, as more than 16,000 financial data files had been erased from its computer system.

Unlike other federal departments, the DOD has never been subjected to an annual audit.

While the U.S. government established requirements for each agency to present financial statements back in the 1990s, for more than 20 years, the Department of Defense has lagged behind other agencies that were following modern accounting standards, reporting what they received and spent.

In 2010, Congress included a requirement in the National Defense Authorization Act that gave the military "an extra seven years to clean up the books and get ready," as Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa said last year. That set a new deadline to be ready for an audit by September 2017.

In January, the Government Accountability Office said, "serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) that have prevented its financial statements from being auditable."

Only days ago the Pentagon announced that it would undertake its first audit (http://thefreethoughtproject.com/pentagon-missing-trillions-audit/) in history.

"The Defense Department is starting the first agency-wide financial audit in its history," the Pentagon's news service noted.

"Beginning in 2018, our audits will occur annually, with reports issued Nov. 15," said David L. Norquist, the Defense Department's comptroller.

The likely reason for the traditionally lax oversight is the fact that government contractors and weapons manufacturers are often the largest beneficiaries of excessive waste and unaccounted funds.

The fact that defense contractors spent upwards of $30 million on donations to political campaigns (https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/totals.php?cycle=2018&ind=D) last year provides Congress with a motive to cover-up the massive and systemic fraud, as they fear biting the hand that feeds them.

While the Department of Defense and HUD can't account for $21 trillion dollars of taxpayer funds, in 2014 (http://www.povertyusa.org/the-state-of-poverty/poverty-facts/) there were 47 million people, including over 15 million children, living in poverty in the U.S.-15% of the U.S. population-which is the largest total number in poverty since records began being kept 52 years ago.

Please share this story if you are appalled by the fact that there are Americans that are homeless and hungry, including U.S. combat veterans-while the government is unable to account for $21 trillion dollars of taxpayer money.

[BMJ]

I wonder if this is only the start, and probably is, hopefully Trump will seek to audit the alphabet agencies, the federal reserve and other government bodies.

[Hervé]

$21 trillion of unauthorized spending by US govt discovered by economics professor (https://www.rt.com/usa/413411-trillions-dollars-missing-research/)

RT
Published time: 16 Dec, 2017 15:18
Get short URL (https://on.rt.com/8uzn)


https://cdni.rt.com/files/2017.12/article/5a352363fc7e93692b8b4567.jpg
© Lee Jae Won / Reuters


The US government may have misspent $21 trillion, a professor at Michigan State University has found. Papers supporting the study briefly went missing just as an audit was announced.

Two departments of the US federal government may have spent as much as $21 trillion on things they can’t account for between 1998 and 2015. At least that’s what Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics at MSU specializing in public finance, and his team have found.

They came up with the figure after digging the websites of departments of Defense (DoD) and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as well as repots of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) over summer.

The research was triggered by Skidmore hearing Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary in the HUD in the first Bush administration, saying the Inspector General found $6.5 trillion worth of military spending that the DoD couldn’t account for. She was referring to a July 2016 report by the OIG, but Skidmore thought she must be mistaking billion for trillion. Based on his previous experience with public finances, he thought the figure was too big even for an organization as large as the US military.
“Sometimes you have an adjustment just because you don’t have adequate transactions… so an auditor would just recede. Usually it’s just a small portion of authorized spending, maybe one percent at most. So for the Army one percent would be $1.2 billion of transactions that you just can’t account for,” he explained in an interview with USAWatchdog.com (https://usawatchdog.com/missing-21-trillion-means-federal-government-is-lawless-dr-mark-skidmore/) earlier this month.
After discovering that the figure was accurate, he and Fitts collaborated with a pair of graduate students to comb through thousands of reports of the OIG dating back to 1998, when new rules of public accountability for the federal government were set and all the way to 2015, the time of the latest reports available at the time. The research was only for the DoD and the HUD.
“This is incomplete, but we have found $21 trillion in adjustments over that period. The biggest chunk is for the Army. We were able to find 13 of the 17 years and we found about $11.5 trillion just for the Army,” Skidmore said.
The professor would not suggest whether the missing trillions went to some legitimate undisclosed projects, wasted or misappropriated, but believes his find indicates that there is something profoundly wrong with the budgeting process in the US federal government. Such lack of transparency goes against the due process of authorizing federal spending through the US Congress, he said.

Skidmore also co-authored a column on Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-government-spent-21-trillion-of-our-money-without-telling-us/#356abe297aef), explaining his research.

The same week the interview took place the DoD announced that it will conduct its first-ever audit (https://www.rt.com/usa/413411-trillions-dollars-missing-research/READ MORE: Pentagon announces first-ever audit https:/www.rt.com/usa/412529-pentagon-first-ever-audit/). “It is important that the Congress and the American people have confidence in DoD’s management of every taxpayer dollar,” Comptroller David Norquist told reporters as he explained that the OIG has hired independent auditors to dig through the military finances.
“While we can’t know for sure what role our efforts to compile original government documents and share them with the public has played, we believe it may have made a difference,” Skidmore commented (http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2017/msu-scholars-find-21-trillion-in-unauthorized-government-spending-defense-department-to-conduct/).
Interestingly, in early December the authors of the research discovered that the links to key document they used, including the 2016 report, had been disabled. Days later the documents were reposted under different addresses, they say (https://missingmoney.solari.com/dod-and-hud-missing-money-supporting-documentation/).

Related:
Pentagon can’t account for $6.5 trillion of taxpayer money – IG report (https://www.rt.com/usa/356562-pentagon-account-trillion-audit/)

5 costly Pentagon projects of dubious merit (https://www.rt.com/usa/352879-five-pentagon-wasteful-projects/)

=======================================

As for how the CIA and the Pentagon cooked their books, see Sue Arrigo's "US Corruption Cases 1-17 (http://avalonlibrary.net/Sue_Arrigo/US_Corruption_%20Cases_%201-17_UD_with_photos_%204%20Jun%2008.pdf)" (PDF file)

[ramus]

DoD Audit Trillions Missing, Facebook Censorship, Smaller “Useable” Nukes

The Daily Wrap Up – 1/12 /18

12 Jan 2018 Posted by Ryan Cristián

http://www.thelastamericanvagabond.com/daily-wrap-up/1-12-dod-audit-trillions-missing-facebook-censorship-smaller-useable-nukes/
Welcome to The Daily Wrap Up, a concise show dedicated to brining you the most relevant independent news, as we see it, from the last 24 hours.

From the wars we wage, the acts passed by Congress, to the executive orders signed, we need to begin to recognize that we are a land of lawless action today, dressed up as “one of the people.” We must see today that the people no longer hold sway over the process, if they ever did.

As Ron Paul recently pointed out, the topic of “reform” is always summoned when an issue gains negative attention. However, history has shown that this almost always means the codifying of the very laws being broken or abused in the first place. The Patriot act is a perfect example. And now we see the FISA extension, and how its “reform” means at the very least, more of the same.

Before you watch today’s wrap up, it is important to note, as we do in the show, that we are continually being bombarded with moral outrage stories designed to distract you from the larger issues at play. This does not mean they are not real, or not important, only that they are being used, pushed forward, in order to draw attention from much larger issues. Do not let MSM lead you astray. Stay Vigilant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=8&v=PEHCoCMFaeU 15 min.

(Before checking out the YouTube version below, please consider checking us out on DTube first, as we attempt to being pulling away from YouTube and Google in general)

(https://d.tube/#!/v/tlavagabond/drh3unwl)