Maybe the service acadamies should turn out

Posted on: February 10, 2017 at 16:01:47 CT

some accountants. This is just one of the reasons defense doesn't need more money. Book it.


In 1990, Congress passed a law requiring an annual audit of all federal agencies. The Defense Department was under orders to be audit-ready by 1996. Two decades later, it’s still not.

As of 2013, Pentagon bookkeepers groaned under the weight of no fewer than 2,100 antiquated and error-prone record-keeping systems, most of them incapable of interacting with each other.

On the day before the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said, “According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions."

By year-end 2013, that number had swelled to $8.5 trillion, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Finance and Accounting Service. That’s going back to the original 1996 deadline.

We don’t have a more recent figure… but a mid-2016 report found a $6.5 trillion black hole just in the Army.

In 2009, Congress "got tough" and imposed a new cross-your-heart, hope-to-die deadline for the Pentagon to be audit-ready: Sept. 30, 2017.

But as we’ve pointed out more than once, there were no “or else” consequences attached to the deadline — no fines or jail time for anyone, not even a requirement that some undersecretary of defense read Accounting for Dummies and turn in a three-page book report to the U.S. comptroller general.

It’s not for lack of trying: Over the last eight years, new bookkeeping systems have been planned, only to be canceled later — often after $1 billion or more was spent on each.