Yahoo Moneyā The Daily Ticker Ā is reporting that is has discovered a Reuters investigationĀ that reveals $8.5 trillion ā thatās trillion with a āTā ā in taxpayer money doled out by Congress to the Pentagon since 1996 that has never been accounted for.
You read that right. While RepublicanĀ politiciansĀ rush to slash food stamps for the 47 million Americans living in poverty ā the highest amount in nearly two decades āĀ Ā Republican U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has the audacity to complain that $20 billion dollars in automaticĀ sequester cuts to the massive and secretive $565.8 billion Defense Department budgetĀ are ātoo steep, too deep, and too abrupt,ā all while the Pentagon and the Defense Department are overseeing massive fraud, waste, and abuse.
For anyone wondering, Reuters reportsĀ that theĀ D.O.D.ās 2012 budget totaled $565.8 billion, more than the annual defense budgets of the 10 next largest military spenders combined, including Russia and China.
In an interview, Linda Woodford, an employee at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service ā the Pentagonās main accounting agency ā reveals to Reuters that she spent the lastĀ 15 years of her career simply āplugging inā false numbers every month to balance the books;
āA lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate. We didnāt have the detail ā¦ for a lot of it.ā
In the REAL WORLD, that would be called MASSIVE FRAUD.
Woodfordās involvement in the fraud doesnāt even begin to scratch the surface. The report also reveals that āa single DFAS office in Columbus, Ohio, made at least $1.59 trillion ā yes, trillion ā in errors,Ā including $538 billion in plugs, in financial reports for the Air Force in 2009.ā
Yahoo FinanceĀ lists someĀ additional findings, including;
- The DOD has amassed a backlog of more than $500 billion in unaudited contracts with outside vendors. How much of that money paid for actual goods and services delivered isnāt known.
- Over the past 10 years the DOD has signed contracts for provisions of more than $3 trillion in goods and services. How much of that money is wasted in overpayments to contractors, or was never spent and never remitted to the Treasury is a mystery.
- The Pentagon uses a standard operating procedure to enter false numbers, or āplugs,ā to cover lost or missing information in their accounting in order to submit a balanced budget to the Treasury. In 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in these reconciling amounts. That was up from $7.41 billion the year before.
Watch via The Daily Ticker
