The Pentagon Can't Account for $21T

This article is terrible, but there are much better sources:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-audit-army/u-s-army-f...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-go...

"The Defense Department’s 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."

The total of 21 trillion includes "adjustments" made by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in addition to branches of the Pentagon.

It’s the military and it’s tax money. “Manually transferred” or “unsupported” or “doesn’t meet proper accounting standards” doesn’t debunk “can’t account for”, it directly supports that point!

Opening paragraph of The Fine Article's linked Forbes source:

> On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”. The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments. According to the GAO's Comptroller General, "Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions…. For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly." [1]

This isn't actually necessarily money that's been spent illegitimately or secretly, or something. It sounds more like sloppy bookkeeping.

Note also that the author also writes for RT. It doesn't make him wrong, but it does invite scrutiny into the underlying narratives this piece was penned to support; they probably aren't just on the level of "Army bad at accounting."

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-go...

It appears this just comes down to inadequate inter-departmental accounting, not necessarily a net loss of any total amount of money, much less $21 trillion.

The original source appears to be https://www.forbes.com/sites/kotlikoff/2017/12/08/has-our-go..., which explains the situation better. For example:

The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments. According to the GAO's Comptroller General, "Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled."

In other words, far more money goes in and out of the Army, or between its various departments, than its total net cost to the government, as one might expect for any large bureaucracy.

Except that it does. He mentions that the budget is the official budget, ie the on paper budget. The unaccounted for spending is 54 times that amount. It's just not on the papers

Because trillion. If that’s true, that’s not just some extra secret projects to break all encryption and build a secret moonbase- it would mean that the US government was secretly printing a quantity of cash roughly equal to its own GDP, indicating that the dollar would be worth a fraction of its apparent value (if anything) and making a total economic collapse of Western civilization a virtual necessity. It merits a bit of surprise.

However, looking into the .gov report where they’re getting this from, it looks like the “21 trillion” figure is the total of all adjustments both up and down, to any part of the budget sheet- sloppy accounting is being done, but the net “adjustment” (the amount of money being unilaterally summoned from unclear sources due to Pentagon malarkey) is merely (!) in the hundred-millions or billions.

I hope most of the money goes into high tech secret projects but I suspect a lot of it is just paying off dictators with pallets full of cash.