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A new report says the Pentagon's finances are in disarray
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Jose Mercury News/Knight Ridder
Posted: November 11th, 2006
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/145...
The Defense Department's accounting practices are in such disarray that defense officials can't track how much equipment the military owns, where it all is or exactly how they spend defense dollars every year. The report by Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities called the Pentagon's financial-management practices an embarrassment. "Today, if the Defense Department were a private business it would be involved in a major scandal," said Kwai Chan, a former top official with the Government Accountability Office and the report's author. The nonpartisan group, made up of more than 600 current and retired business executives from U.S. companies, thinks that federal spending priorities are undermining national security. A report this year from the White House's Office of Management and Budget found that 20 out of 23 defense programs that auditors looked at...didn't use strong financial-management practices. In reports to Congress in recent years, the GAO found $100 million that could be collected annually from defense contractors who underpaid federal taxes. The federal government had collected less than 1 percent of that. $1.2 billion in Army supplies shipped to Iraq [also] couldn't be accounted for. As a result, military units ended up short on "tires, tank tracks, helicopter spare parts, radio batteries and other basic items." The Defense Department's Office of the Inspector General has pronounced the department "un-auditable."
Note: The article failed to mention Rumsfeld's own admission "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," as reported on CBS. The CBS article goes on to state that "[the Pentagon's] own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends." See this highly underreported article at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml
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