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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Has the ever been another agency where billions going 'missing' is tolerated?

What's odd is that at the lower levels people will absolutely freak out if a computer monitor (~$300?) can't be located. I guess it's not small items like that that add up to the billions missing, it's large/expensive things that are missing.

When I was at about 20, the comptroller at my employer told me that you can make mistakes on big important things and people may not notice, but errors in petty cash will always be noticed.

Granted, billions missing could amount to a fraction of one percent. And yes programs like Medicare have big fraud problems.

Medicare isn't losing most of that money to their own administrators out of their back door; it's being taken by doctors, users.

And likewise, the defense department is losing money primarily on overpriced contracts, not DoD personnel wiring money to their own bank accounts.

No, they get it on the back end in the form of (sometimes obfuscated) kickbacks.

Overpriced contracts sounds like something easily accounted for. This is stuff that's literally 'missing' during audits by teams of professional accountants.

Things like the SR-71 and B-2 development programs are off the higher level books.

Due to the compartmentalized nature of some of the programs (with good reason), it’s infeasible the DoD would ever pass a traditional audit.

Much like the CIA intentionally obfuscates funding for 3rd parties.

And yet other countries in the free world seem to manage this problem just fine…

That's because they don't have a government in a government in a government.... 127 layers deep. More like 2-3.

Because the US provides the SR-71s and B-2s for those countries.

Bingo. I can’t think of any other EU/NATO/FVEY country that actually does development of defence tech on the scale the US does.

That doesn't mean the US gov can't find auditors with proper security clearance to account for those black budgets.

You’re missing the “compartmentalized” nature of TS/SCI projects. You would need many, many auditors or the paperwork would be enormous to be cleared for each one.

Yes it’s technically possible, but the current model doesn’t support moving between compartments easily.

Sure, but the comment I was responding to referenced auditing the DoD.

This is a whole different can of worms :)

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