Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Probably just a rounding error

"U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds".
The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.
Simply made them up. Maybe I'll try that the next time I do my taxes, see what happens.

5 comments:

Veeshir said...

There's two ways I can look at that.

On the one hand, they were fudging the numbers to try to perform the tasks they were set as Obama took money from their budget.
Or...

Since I'm U:n sure there are very many places in the gov't that would have to redo their numbers if they ever had an honest audit I figure there's a good chance Obama had them do this so he could lower the deficit.

It had been over a $trillion a year for years and suddenly, the debt clock stopped for a few months and then it started again at much less than a $trillion a year.
I was suspicious of that so I'm leaning more toward option B.

JeffS said...

Given all the bureaucratic controls on spending money in the Department of Defense (not to mention the Army), I'd say we are looking at massive incompetence, combined with massive corruption.

No invoices? No payment. That's the mantra of the Army Contracting Command, an organization that was established precisely to avoid this problem.

Or so they said.

Anonymous said...

Wronwright?

RebeccaH said...

I once had a graduate student in a master of business program ask me what "capital assets" were. I could have cried. Is this any surprise, given the state of American education over the past forty years?

Deborah said...

So the Hollywood studios aren't the only ones who "cook the books". The studios are always said to have three sets of books; one for the shareholders, one for management, and one for the IRS.

How can you "do more with less" if you aren't creative?

"...16,000 financial data files had vanished from its computer system. Faulty computer programming and employees’ inability to detect the flaw were at fault, the IG said." Sounds familiar.