Financial safety

How $21 Trillion in U.S. Tax Money Disappeared. “Full Scope Audit” of the Pentagon

According to the Department of Defense Inspector General and the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, $21 Trillion in Taxpayer Funding Is Unaccounted For.

To help people comprehend the scale of this, $1 Trillion is $1000 Billion. This means that $21,000 Billion in taxpayer money has gone missing.

How can this be possible?

We outlined the “Unaccountable System of Global War Profiteers” in detail here.

For further understanding, we are featuring another mind-blowing Department of Defense Inspector General (DOD IG) report.

The following are highlights from the DOD IG “Summary of DOD Office of the Inspector General Audits of Financial Management”:

• The financial management systems DOD has put in place to control and monitor the money flow don’t facilitate but actually “prevent DOD from collecting and reporting financial information… that is accurate, reliable, and timely.” (p. 4)
• DOD frequently enters “unsupported” (i.e. imaginary) amounts in its books (p. 13) and uses those figures to make the books balance. (p. 14)
• Inventory records are not reviewed and adjusted; unreliable and inaccurate data are used to report inventories, and purchases are made based on those distorted inventory reports. (p. 7)
• DOD managers do not know how much money is in their accounts at the Treasury, or when they spend more than Congress appropriates to them. (p. 5)18
• Nor does DOD “record, report, collect, and reconcile” funds received from other agencies or the public (p. 6),
• DOD tracks neither buyer nor seller amounts when conducting transactions with other agencies. (p. 12)
• “The cost and depreciation of the DOD general property, plant, and equipment are not reliably reported….” (p. 8);
• “… the value of DOD property and material in the possession of contractors is not reliably reported.” (p. 9)
• DOD does not know who owes it money, nor how much. (p. 10.)