Activity

Shocked, shocked I tell you! Accounting Irregularities at Rick’s War and …. er, um, Bar and Grill. My favorite sentence from this article “While the Defense Department couldn’t ‘adequately support all accounting adjustments, that does not mean they were inaccurate or erroneous,’ – Uhhhh what? It would seem that adequate support for an adjustment is exactly what would make it acceptable.
As a philosopher who has had over 20 years experience dealing with state budgets and accounting I can honestly say that no system of metaphysics that I have encountered can compare nor compete with the metaphysics (and concomitant ontologies) of … accounting. (see Mr. Anchovy, Chartered Account … https://youtu.be/NAOQH4xEyhM)
Another obvious question here would seem to be that there is an awareness of a problem that has been ALLOWED to be ongoing for quite some time with apparently (at least it hasn’t been made known if there has in fact been any attempt to rectify the situation) no attempt to change the accounting system. Hmmmmm. Lets see … money created (wait that’s way to complicated to be involved here … just forget that was ever mentioned) lets change that to money in (from “some alleged source”) / money out (received by “some alleged agency or contractor) / money spent (“disbursement” sounds like way to accountant like, with documentation as to WHO it was spent with (the name(s) of alleged agency or contractor (CIA or other three letter agency front companies may be included of course), WHEN it was spent (a calendar will suffice here), where it was spent (an alleged address or a mailboxes R us location will suffice – heck use a New Zealand postmark with a return address of Box 189, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for all I care [see details on receipt of MJ-12 Documents as to why this would be amusing]) HOW MUCH – us 99%ers call this the TOTAL (of course this doesn’t have to be an actual number representing an actual number of dollars), and at least SOME INDICATION (item and description please, yes I know that this would be difficult for various shades of grey [no pun intended, I don’t think we are actually contracting with ETs but who knows anymore … am I right?… apologies, oh, er, um, excuse me what is the Ufoololgy politically correct, Gnostic term now for ETs, E something Bs or some such thing] and Night Vision Required (a Gnostic language, politically correct euphemism for Magick [please notice that I included the “k” in order to be inclusive] Marker redacted Programs but they could say things such as “200 55gal drums of ‘spooky black goo’ ” or “medical supplies” – of course we all know that means ribs and sauce from a wonderful BBQ place in Chicago as ordered by Hawkeye and Trapper John) as to what object(s) were allegedly acquired with the PO (a Purchase Order, what a perfectly quaint idea) Seems like a start of a sort … Of course … I could be wrong.
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Pentagon racks up $35 trillion in accounting changes in a year (HEADLINE)
by Tony Capaccio … from Bloomberg

The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker who’s pursued the accounting morass.

The figure dwarfs the $738 billion of defense-related funding in the latest U.S. budget, a spending plan that includes the most expensive weapons systems in the world including the F-35 jet as well as new aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.

“Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts,” said Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Defense Department acknowledged that it failed its first-ever audit in 2018 and then again last year, when it reviewed $2.7 trillion in assets and $2.6 trillion in liabilities. While auditors found no evidence of fraud in the review of finances that Congress required, they flagged a laundry list of problems, including accounting adjustments.

Although it gets scant public attention compared with airstrikes, troop deployments, sexual assault statistics or major weapons programs, the reliability of the Pentagon’s financial statement is an indication of how effectively the military manages its resources considering that it receives over half of discretionary domestic spending.

The military services make adjustments, some automatic and some manual, on a monthly and quarterly basis, and those actions are consolidated by the Pentagon’s primary finance and accounting service and submitted to the Treasury.

There were 546,433 adjustments in fiscal 2017 and 562,568 in 2018, according to figures provided by Representative Jackie Speier, who asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. The watchdog agency will release a report on the subject Wednesday after reviewing more than 200,000 fourth-quarter 2018 adjustments totaling $15 trillion.

‘Sloppy Record-Keeping’
The “combined errors, shorthand, and sloppy record-keeping by DoD accountants do add up to a number nearly 1.5 times the size of the U.S. economy,” said Speier, a California Democrat. The report shows the Pentagon “employs accounting adjustments like a contractor paints over mold. Their priority is making the situation look manageable, not solving the underlying problem,” she said.

Mark Easton, the Defense Department’s deputy chief financial officer, wrote the GAO that in response to its audit the department “is actively developing strategies” to reduce accounting adjustments.

Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood said that “annually, DoD has hundreds of billions of dollars of financial activity, and accounting adjustments are sometimes used to record activity in our financial reporting systems due to a lack of system capabilities or interfaces.”

Many of these older systems “were designed without consideration for current financial accounting standards,” Sherwood said. What’s most important to an auditor is whether the adjustments “are properly supported” because “properly supported adjustments ensure financial statement values are accurate. We have made significant progress in reducing the number and dollar value of unsupported adjustments by over 30% and 70%, respectively,” he said.

As an example of how the dollar figures multiply, Sherwood said recognizing $800 million due a contractor in previously unrecorded payments “requires multiple accounting adjustments that net to $0 but could total over $5 billion” in movement between accounts.

Documentation Lacking
The GAO estimated based on a sample that at least 96% of 181,947 automatic adjustments made in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018 “didn’t have adequate supporting documentation.”

“In layman’s terms, this means that the DoD made adjustments to accounting records without having documentation to support the need or amount for the adjustment,” said Dwrena Allen, spokeswoman for the Pentagon’s inspector general. “The size and scope of unsupported adjustments is deeply concerning because it tells a story of poor internal controls and lack of financial data integrity.”

While the Defense Department couldn’t “adequately support all accounting adjustments, that does not mean they were inaccurate or erroneous,” said Allen. But “because the DoD could not provide support, the auditors could not draw conclusions regarding the adjustments.”