Pentagon doesn't know where $6.5 trillion went

Maybe Castro has it?

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What Trillion dollar bill?
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There was approximately $1.39 trillion in circulation as of September 30, 2015, of which $1.34 trillion was in Federal Reserve notes. (Paper Money)

Whatever the Pentagon is missing is just made up bullshit money anyway that they won't have to account for. Banks/Govt just create their own money whenever they please. Nobody is going to give two shits about losing some money that doesn't exist.
 
It would surprise me more if there was an accurate accounting of those monies. I love me some America but the way it run is funky.
 
I'm glad you went to a non-partisan source from more than a year ago to fill us in.

While Republican politicians rush to slash food stamps for the 47 million Americans living in poverty – the highest amount in nearly two decades – Republican U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has the audacity to complain that $20 billion dollars in automatic sequester cuts to the massive and secretive $565.8 billion Defense Department budget are “ too steep, too deep, and too abrupt,” all while the Pentagon and the Defense Department are overseeing massive fraud, waste, and abuse.

For anyone wondering, Reuters reports that the D.O.D.’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.
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Can anyone explain this, how one office made errors and plugs greater than the entire DOD annual budget?

The report also reveals that “a single DFAS office in Columbus, Ohio, made at least $1.59 trillion – yes, trillion – in errors, including $538 billion in plugs, in financial reports for the Air Force in 2009.”
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And does this make sense?

[/quote]$8.5 trillion – that’s trillion with a “T” – in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for.[/quote]

8.5t / 18.5 years = $459b a year when the 2012 budget was $566b?
 
"I once lost $30,000 on a horse. She just.... ran off with it."
-Calvin Fischoeder
 
Well, at least the trillion dollars for the development of the F-35 is accounted for. I hope you guys enjoy your $3,000 share in tax money for that plane.
 
Most likely to classified projects.

Remember the old stories of the military buying $500 hammers in the 1980s? people pointed to it as an example government waste, when in reality it was money that was going to build the stealth bomber.
 
Fawlty said:
In before people claim 6.5 trillion was stolen rather than not accounted for properly. We went through this a decade ago.
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Anyone suggesting it was "Stolen" is idiotic. This money was just spent on shady stuff and the DoD doesn't want us to know about it.
 
I read all about this in a very interesting article by Reuters several years go. Check it out.

MadSquabbles500 said:
Why dont they just go ahead and complete the audit? It will tell them where the discrepancies are.
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From the article I linked above:

Because of its persistent inability to tally its accounts, the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a law that requires annual audits of all government departments. That means that the $8.5 trillion in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996, the first year it was supposed to be audited, has never been accounted for. That sum exceeds the value of China's economic output last year.

Congress in 2009 passed a law requiring that the Defense Department be audit-ready by 2017. Then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta in 2011 tightened the screws when ordered that the department make a key part of its books audit-ready in 2014.

Reuters has found that the Pentagon probably won't meet its deadlines. (See related article [ID:nL2N0J00PX].) The main reason is rooted in the Pentagon's continuing reliance on a tangle of thousands of disparate, obsolete, largely incompatible accounting and business-management systems. Many of these systems were built in the 1970s and use outmoded computer languages such as COBOL on old mainframes. They use antiquated file systems that make it difficult or impossible to search for data. Much of their data is corrupted and erroneous.

"It's like if every electrical socket in the Pentagon had a different shape and voltage," says a former defense official who until recently led efforts to modernize defense accounting.

No one can even agree on how many of these accounting and business systems are in use. The Pentagon itself puts the number at 2,200 spread throughout the military services and other defense agencies. A January 2012 report by a task force of the Defense Business Board, an advisory group of business leaders appointed by the secretary of defense, put the number at around 5,000.
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Fawlty said:
@PolishHeadlock, how much would these fuckers have to pay you to go in and straighten this shit out? Raise my taxes a few bucks, whatevs. lol.
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From the same source:

The Pentagon has spent tens of billions of dollars to upgrade to new, more efficient technology in order to become audit-ready. But many of these new systems have failed, either unable to perform all the jobs they were meant to do or scrapped altogether - only adding to the waste they were meant to stop.
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PolishHeadlock said:
I would dominate the fuck out of this....

I honestly have no clue how government accounting works. They don't produce income and I doubt they have a balance sheet...
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There's a good way someone in the private sector can grasp it.

Imagine if the software you used for the payroll couldn't communicate with the software you used to keep your books. Now imagine that you have three warehouses and each one runs a different inventory system that uses different hardware and software and neither of them can interface with each other or with the software you use to keep the books.

And that everything that goes in and out of the factory floor gets logged by hand in notebooks that you then have manually enter the date into the other systems (if you can understand the foreman's handwriting). Oh, and by the way, the payroll on the factory is run in another system separate from the one in headquarters. And that software was created from scratch by Gary from IT and he is the only one who knows how it works and he refuses to teach it to anyone so you can't fire him.

And you can't change the payroll software at headquarters either because Jimmy from IT retired 3 years ago and he was the only one who had the source code.

Now multiply this by 1,000,000,000 and you have the US Armed Forces bookkeeping.
 
Big_Chief_Stove said:
Anyone suggesting it was "Stolen" is idiotic. This money was just spent on shady stuff and the DoD doesn't want us to know about it.
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That's not true either. If these agencies go over budget, they have to get more money. There isn't just an infinite pool of money sitting around to spend on "shady stuff." They either get it from congress or get it through front companies, as the CIA is famous for. It's not physically possible for 6.5 trillion to just up and spend itself.
 
Fawlty said:
That's not true either. If these agencies go over budget, they have to get more money. There isn't just an infinite pool of money sitting around to spend on "shady stuff." They either get it from congress or get it through front companies, as the CIA is famous for. It's not physically possible for 6.5 trillion to just up and spend itself.
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Of course it didn't spend itself and it wasn't all in one purchase either. US was funding and training ISIS in Syria, when did that ever stop? Has it?

That's the kind of shady shit, I could see our Gov't setting aside money for.
 
http://www.commondreams.org/news/20...reds-thousands-guns-went-iraq-and-afghanistan
http://www.commondreams.org/news/20...reds-thousands-guns-went-iraq-and-afghanistan
Pentagon also lost many, many weapons in the middle east. Anywhere from 700 000 to 7 million.

The U.S. government has shipped over 1.4 million guns to Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11, according a new analysis by the U.K.-based watchdog Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), but the Pentagon is only able to account for fewer than half of them.
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No accountability for expensive stripper/hooker parties.
 
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