GAO Cannot Audit Federal Government, Cites Department Of Defense Problems

Comments

Samarami's picture

This is terrible news!

I mean, who would even give thought to the idea that those knighted and valiant defenders of the Sacred Homeland would be careless of other folks' resources!

Oh, the shame of it all.

Jest 'cause they have open-ended credit cards shouldn't prevent them from being very keerful of "our-tax-dollars"!

Support-The-Troops I say!

Sam

mjackso6's picture

The entire environment of the military promotes fraud, waste and abuse, though they're constantly harping on the subject and whining that we, the troops, have to find ways to conserve. This when the majority of the waste comes from the top down.

If a military unit (or other government office for that matter) doesn't spend it's entire budget by October 1st (unfathomably the beginning of the 'fiscal year'), the budget for the next year will be reduced, and God forbid that we actually only take as much money as we need to get the job done. So from about August on, pretty much every unit in the military does it's damndest to spend every dollar that was allocated to it last year, for whatever they think they can justify as mission/Soldier-support related, all in the hopes of receiving a bigger budget next year since they obviously need it.

It's a friggin' nightmare to say the least. I used to be our unit's URL representative (no, I don't remember what URL stands for), the one who has to collect all of the unit's statistics (personnel, training, maintenance, etc.) every month and present them at a cermony of ritual humiliation (every 'i' dotted, 't' crossed and a dozen different meaningless statistics crunched to a tolerance of zero defects), and it's flat amazing just how 'broken' your typical Army unit is on a month-to-month basis, not to mention the resources being pissed away down the military-industrial crapper.

It's something that you get so used to seeing once you've been in the military for more than a few years that you don't even really notice it until you've been ~out~ for a few.

Mike Jackson

Darkcrusade's picture

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xU4GdHLUHwU

''Not many people seem to remember the big news story on 9/10/2001 because of the timing it was released (obviously the day before 9/11). Do you? I've often wondered about the status of the promised investigation of it... there is no status because there never was an investigation... just an announcement to cover Rumsfeld.

Donald Rumsfeld (then Secretary of Defense) announces that the Pentagon (whose ?accounting? offices were destroyed the next day) could not account for $2.3 TRILLION - purportedly 25% of their budget although if you add up the Congressional appropriated defense budget from 1996 to 2001, you only come up with $1.6 trillion. That in itself is an investigative story... But... what about what they admitted to?? ''
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml

Darkcrusade's picture

opps double posting, but than again the article seems more than a little redundant in light of the
waste that was suppose to be partially covered up by the 911 mantra.