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Why the Pentagons many campaigns to clean up its accounts are failing
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Reuters
Posted: September 11th, 2016
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/#article/part3
The Pentagon has for years kept lousy books with impunity. [A] 2009 law requiring the Defense Department to be audit-ready by 2017 provides for no penalties if it misses the deadline. From 1995 through 2002, Senator Charles Grassley pushed through an amendment to the annual defense appropriations bill requiring the Pentagon to account for its expenditures by following one seemingly simple procedure: match each payment to the expense it covered. The order was ignored, and Grassley gave up. Each branch has insisted on building from scratch its own systems for basic accounting, logistics and personnel, roughly tripling costs. The Army, Navy and Air Force also routinely disregard department-wide standards and rules imposed by the secretary of defenses office. The Pentagons inefficient method of pursuing efficiency has been on full display in the Army, which ... has been building three separate new systems to handle accounting. In 2008, as work on all three projects was under way, the Army office that oversees acquisition of information systems issued a report, [which] recommended that the Army halt work and consolidate the three systems. Doing so, it said, would save between 25% and 50% of the estimated $4.7 billion construction and operating costs of the three separate systems. The reports recommendations were ignored. Piecemeal fixes that dont address overarching dysfunction reduce even further the chances the Pentagon will be audit-ready by 2017.
Note: Could it be that the real reason the Pentagon is the only branch of US government that doesn't balance its books is that they don't want us to know where the money is going? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing military corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
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