The Pentagon Doesn’t Know What It Spent 8.5 Trillion Dollars On

When government is completely dysfunctional and seems not to serve the people’s interests, we have to wonder where our tax dollars are going. Thanks to a Reuters investigation by Scot Paltrow, we have an answer – or, rather, a non-answer. Apparently, the Pentagon has made use of $8.5 trillion of our tax money handed over by Congress since 1996 – but don’t ask what was done with the money. The Department of Defense doesn’t have a clue.
Audits of all federal agencies were mandated by law beginning in 1996, but the Pentagon is unique in neverhaving complied. In almost 20 years, the Pentagon has never accounted for trillions it spent, in part because ‘plugging’ – fudging the numbers – is standard operating procedure.
According to the investigation, employees of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s primary accounting agency, were routinely told by superiors to take ‘unsubstantiated change actions.’ These plugs – which amounted to falsifying the books – were used to bring the military’s figures in line with the Treasury’s when discrepancies couldn’t be traced and accounted for. According to DFAS employee, Linda Woodford, ‘A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate. We didn’t have the detail . . . for a lot of it.’This so-called plugging isn’t unique to DFAS – when it comes to resolving lost or missing information, it’s just business as usual in every branch of the service.

This post was published at The Daily Sheeple on June 10th, 2015.