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

[cursichella1]

No surprises here...I'm still wondering about the Pentagon's 2.3 TRILLION that Donald Rumsfeld announced (oops!) was MISSING on 9/10/2001, then red herring'd away via the events of 9/11. (Btw, coincidently, the offices of those auditing the missing trillions were destroyed and the auditors killed by whatever blew a hole into the side of the Pentagon that day...)

I certainly hope that this latest "expose" isn't heralding another major false flag...(or is that one going off in my brain since reading the article in its entirety?).

Anyway, this article eventually finds a way to blame most of it on lack of a standard, defense-wide computing system, inventories bloated by extinct equipment and munitions and input errors. Also, cherry picks on a few civilian military employees' defense contractor kickbacks, (prosecuted the civilian military employee but no mention of any arrests of the kickback-paying defense contractors...hmmm)

See article below video or entire article linked here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...9AH0LQ20131118

See also the clarifying Reuters video linked here and embedded below: Billions in Pentagon spending down a black hole | Video http://reut.rs/1aE2hWt

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=kjTiFKZXoU4

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

(Reuters) - 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...


Full article is here: http://reut.rs/183ibfD

[ceetee9]

Posted by cursichella1 (here)
No surprises here...I'm still wondering about the Pentagon's 2.3 TRILLION that Donald Rumsfeld announced (oops!) was MISSING on 9/10/2001, then red herring'd away via the events of 9/11. (Btw, coincidently, the offices of those auditing the missing trillions were destroyed and the auditors killed by whatever blew a hole into the side of the Pentagon that day...)

No need to sweat it cursichella. They're working on that pesky accounting problem (still). They should have it fixed by the 22nd century or so. Say, I wonder if they used the same software engineers that developed the Obamacare healthcare website to develop that billion dollar accounting system they scrapped. Hmmm... Might have to adjust that fix date to the 23rd century.

[sheme]

Well it did go down a black hole- Denver Airport.