The Pentagon's doctored ledgers conceal epic waste

[Greg Bernhardt]

So many depressing stories lately. Make you wonder how you can have faith in anything.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/18/us-usa-pentagon-waste-specialreport-idUSBRE9AH0LQ20131118

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."

 

[phinds]

Did you see the recent story about how corrupt Navy officers enriched a foreign businessman in return for various kinds of large bribes? I suspect that's the tip of the iceberg.

 

[edward]

I am not surprised to see this. Now they will probably waste money trying to stop the waste of money.

 

[mheslep]

Perhaps part of the problem is size:

From 2001 to 2012, the active duty military grew by just 3.4 percent. Yet over the same timeframe the number of civilian defense employees grew by 17 percent, an increase five times greater than the armed forces.

Read more: Are Pentagon Civilians Really Behind the Pentagon’s Money Woes? | TIME.com http://nation.time.com/2013/06/04/a...ehind-the-pentagons-money-woes/#ixzz2n6vwwT3W

 

[Vanadium 50]

I am not surprised to see this. Now they will probably waste money trying to stop the waste of money.

You're probably kidding, but a lot of waste comes from the desire to eliminate waste. That's why the Army has warehouses full of stuff they don't need - because they will get creamed by OMB if they throw away a $1 item and a year later someone buys a similar $1 item. So we spend millions warehousing these items.

 

[phinds]

Here's a followup on my previous post.

http://news.yahoo.com/navy-investigator-pleads-guilty-bribery-case-000305246.html