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Comment by guimarin | Hacker News Reader

I'm all about gov't waste, and oh my god numbers are hard, but pretty sure they fudged it by Billions not Trillions. In the article they mention that the total true-up of all the problems was ~65B. So this headline is off by a couple orders of magnitude.

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From the article:

  > At first glance adjustments totaling trillions may seem impossible. The amounts dwarf the
  > Defense Department’s entire budget. Making changes to one account also require making 
  > changes to multiple levels of sub-accounts, however. That created a domino effect where,
  > essentially, falsifications kept falling down the line. In many instances this daisy-chain
  > was repeated multiple times for the same accounting item.

bingo, this is an asinine way to do bookkeeping. And reuters shouldn't report based on this kind of waterfall problem. The issue is we're off by ~65B which is over 10% of the budget. That's the scandal someone is misdirecting away from. I want to change the parent to, I get you want to clickbait but seriously??

I think reuters' description is accurate. If you do your accounting in such a way that all numbers are garbage but the errors mostly cancel each other out it's not a matter of being unable to account for 10% of the budget, it's a matter of not being able to trust any numbers at all.

This is deep institutional rot.

65B is still significant. 65B is still almost 1.8% of the total budget for 2015. If you say the government spent 620B on defense, that means 10% of that can't be accounted for. Imagine if you couldn't find 10% of your paycheck at the end of the year. It isn't a trivial amount.

YES. and that's the story that should be highlighted, not some asininely huge number from a shitty accounting implementation. That we are off by more than 10% of the Military budget and 1.8% of the total US budget is nuts.

Unrelated: but after Clapper I don't know how anyone has any faith in the US Gov't. this is just another reinforcement.

I'm not seeing that number anywhere in the article, but it does say:

>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

Do you have another source?

That's misleading because it makes it sound like they were off by a total of 2.8 trillion, but that actually means they made that many adjustments. There is no way they were off that far because that's beyond their entire annual budget.

It would probably be better to focus on the number of adjustments that were made rather than the dollar tally (the number of adjustments will give some sense of the scope of the problem without counting the same dollars over and over again).

Unless of course they had money from previous budgets.

I believe he is referring to this part of the article:

>The spokesman downplayed the significance of the improper changes, which he said net out to $62.4 billion.

>At first glance adjustments totaling trillions may seem impossible. The amounts dwarf the Defense Department’s entire budget. Making changes to one account also require making changes to multiple levels of sub-accounts, however. That created a domino effect where, essentially, falsifications kept falling down the line. In many instances this daisy-chain was repeated multiple times for the same accounting item.

Basically 62 billion was effected, they claim trillions because of "write amplification" across multiple accounts.

Source document: http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2016-113.pdf

I think you are confusing the flow of money with the total budget. I think the numbers reported here are looking at individual transactions that can easily add up to more than a trillion dollars.

I'm not confused. The article states that they had 2.8T in adjustments on a ~500B budget. That is totally insane. That the aggregate averages of all those adjustments are 500% of each and every adjustment is inconceivable. Even the most incompetent organizations are not off by that kind of percentage over ALL of their adjustments.

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