{"id":181244,"date":"2016-08-21T19:40:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-22T00:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/21\/whiskey-tango-foxtrot-trillions-of-dollars\/"},"modified":"2016-08-21T19:40:00","modified_gmt":"2016-08-22T00:40:00","slug":"whiskey-tango-foxtrot-trillions-of-dollars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/21\/whiskey-tango-foxtrot-trillions-of-dollars\/","title":{"rendered":"Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?!?  Trillions of Dollars?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An auditor has found that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/us-usa-audit-army-idUSKCN10U1IG\">the US Army has engaged in trillions of dollars in dodgy spending<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">The United States Army\u2019s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The Defense Department\u2019s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">As a result, the Army\u2019s financial statements for 2015 were \u201cmaterially misstated,\u201d the report concluded. The \u201cforced\u201d adjustments rendered the statements useless because \u201cDoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The new report focused on the Army\u2019s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn\u2019t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWhere is the money going? Nobody knows,\u201d said Franklin Spinney, a retired military analyst for the Pentagon and critic of Defense Department planning.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The significance of the accounting problem goes beyond mere concern for balancing books, Spinney said. Both presidential candidates have called for increasing defense spending amid current global tension.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m beginning to think that we will need to experience something akin to the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Vasa_(ship)\">sinking of the Vasa in 1628<\/a> (which led to the creation of the progenitor of the Swedish defense procurement agency, the FMV) before we end up with a defense procurement system that actually works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An auditor has found that the US Army has engaged in trillions of dollars in dodgy spending: The United States Army\u2019s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.The Defense Department\u2019s Inspector General, in a June report, said the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1038,1008,1039,1006],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-budget","category-defense-procurement","category-incompetence","category-military"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181244"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}