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Posted on 11/26/2013 11:54:52 AM PST by JerseyanExile
For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollars
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
Obama and The Dems will use this to Disband the Military ?
Probably planted information. I would not trust anything that comes out of the MSM.
THATS where the real waste is.
In the long term, I suppose that could be an objective.
Near term, it's just giving a cudgel some willing group of 'rats can use to take money out of Defense Appropriations. (IIRC, just such a bill is awaiting action as we speak.)
Gotta pay for all of those vacations, vote-buying exercises and perks with real money from SOMEWHERE, donchaknow....
I remember the “big 8” refusing to audit the government in any branch or agency. No one wanted the liability or problems associated with showing the total corruption of our DC boys.
The borders are wide open, we have a Communist in the White House, and we are arming Al-CIA-duh to kill Christians in Syria. So, why have we’ve been wasting so much money on a military all these years?
And this is why we now spend over one billion dollars to build a fast attack submarine that cost a mere 50 million$ not that long ago. I sure do miss Rickover.
it is the government accounting system. it is even happening at the local level. no one o one transfer of funds, takes a personal interview to partially compensate for the deviation, the problem still exists so the numbers get fudged ‘cooking the books’.
Someone told this story last week. I think it has a message. Unfortunately I forget who posted it:
During a procurement meeting with the head of SAC at the time, General LeMay, a staffer made a comment they needed a particular weapon system to counter something the enemy had. LeMay asked the staffer whom was the enemy he was referring to. The staffer said the Russians. LeMay said no son, the Russians are an adversary, our enemy is the Navy.
The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen( and citizen’s take home pay)
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IOW, unilateral disarmament, as advocated by the SDS in the 1960s and by Obama (and our various foreign enemies who also happen to be his employers) in the present. Thanks JerseyanExile.
Now, two wars later and five years into the most free spending administration in the history of the Republic, the good folks at the Post want to look at it. I expect that 'Blame Bush' will be part of the story.
its the pensions...the graft and the pensions.....wouldn't want people to actually work would we?...
all these perfumed princesses and their golden pensions and then they walk right into defense jobs....
and every underling just follow orders.....
ain't it grand?
We need more government to track itself.
Biden tracked the Stimuluses - why can’t he track the Pentagon?
/s
LOL
Eloquent.
I wish I could take authorship of that story, alas, just being a reteller.
There was a satire some time ago called “the Pentagon Wars” which was about the development of the Bradley. If it were not close to true, it would be funny.
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