by Tyler Durden
Dec 10, 2017 9:08 AM
After decades of waste, overpayments, trillions of missing or improperly accounted for dollars, and most recently losing track of 44,000 US soldiers, the Pentagon is about to undergo its first audit in history conducted by 2,400 auditors from independent public accounting firms to conduct reviews across the Army, Navy, Air Force and more - followed by annual audits going forward.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis speaks with DoD Comptroller David L. Norquist, June 15, 2017
The announcement follows a May commitment by Pentagon comptroller David Norquist, who previously served as the CFO at the Department of Homeland Security when the agency performed its audit. "Starting an audit is a matter of driving change inside a bureaucracy that may resist it," Norquist told members of the Armed Services Committee at the time when pressed over whether or not he could get the job done at the DHS.
According to the DoD release:
The audit is massive. It will examine every aspect of the department from personnel to real property to weapons to supplies to bases. Some 2,400 auditors will fan out across the department to conduct it, Pentagon officials said.
"It is important that the Congress and the American people have confidence in DoD's management of every taxpayer dollar," Norquist said. -defense.gov
The Pentagon is no stranger to criticism over serious waste and purposefully sloppy accounting. A DoD Inspector General's report from 2016 - which appears to be unavailable on the DoD website (but fortunately WAS archived)- found that in 2015 alone a staggering $6.5 trillion in funds was unaccounted for out of the Army's budget, with $2.8 trillion in "wrongful adjustments" occurring in just one quarter.
In 2015, the Pentagon denied trying to shelve a study detailing $125 billion in waste created by a bloated employee counts for noncombat related work such as human resources, finance, health care management and property management. The report concluded that $125 billion could be saved by making those operations more efficient.
On September 10th, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," after a Pentagon whistleblower set off a probe. A day later, the September 11th attacks happened and the accounting scandal was quickly forgotten. And twenty years before that, DoD analyst Franklin C. Spinney exposed what he called "accounting games," saying "Those numbers are pie in the sky. The books are cooked routinely year after year." In a 2002 testimony before the House Committee on Government Reform, Spinney laid out the DoD's accounting quagmire of un-auditable books and budget projections which don't match reality.
Franklin Spinney, 2002
Finally, those of us old enough to remember the 80's, let's not forget the bombshell report on overpayments the Pentagon made for simple items, such as $37 screws, $7,622 coffee makers, and $640 toilet seats which Sen. William Roth Jr (R-DE) was able to whittle down to $200.
The announcement of the audit comes amid a looming government shutdown battle which was given a two-week extension last week until December 22. If this occurs, military personnel would report to work as usual, but the DoD would not pay them until the shutdown ends.
"I cannot emphasize too much how destructive a shutdown is," Norquist said. "We've talked before about the importance of maintenance on weapons systems and others, but if it's not an excepted activity, there'll be work stoppage on many of those maintenance functions."
With both parties standing to lose more than gain from a shutdown, that is unlikely to happen. Meanwhile, with decades of lost confidence in the Pentagon's accounting practices, we eagerly await the results of this "massive" audit to see exactly how much dirt - and where - previous administrations have swept under the rug.
Thank You Mr Durden and Zerohedge.
zerohedge
by Tyler Durden
Dec 9, 2017 7:00 PM
"The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force," said Thomas Jefferson in an 1807 letter to Chandler Price. And what would the nation's third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence say of today's American "global force" deployed across the earth?
America's "global military presence" is not hyperbole, but a literal fact, as a new Department of Defense study has found that US military personnel are stationed in literally every nation on the earth. The report bluntly confirms that, "The United States has military personnel in nearly every country in the world, ranging from two liaison officers in Fiji to tens of thousands from all of the service branches in Japan and Germany, according to the report."
But perhaps more important and equally absurd (when one considers the original beginnings of the humble "republic" envisioned by founders like Madison and Jefferson) is the fact that America's world-wide military presence is such that the Pentagon itself can't track how many US service members are deployed where. A new bombshell article in Stars and Stripes military newspaper is non-ironically headlined, "Report: 44,000 ‘unknown’ military personnel stationed around the world".
The Stripes article opens with a line that would seem straight out of the Onion, yet matter-of-factly states, "The U.S. military has more than 44,000 troops across the globe that the Pentagon claims it cannot track, according to a recent report."
The Pentagon's system for accounting troop deployment numbers, maintained by the Defense Manpower Data Center under the Office of the Secretary of Defense, lists up to 44,000 troops in a country location category labeled "Unknown".
The report has come to light after a series of recent Pentagon press briefings on military actions in the Middle East and Africa which left journalists scratching their heads. For example the latest DoD admission that there are "about 2,000 troops in Syria" - four times the previously acknowledged figure - came after a late October Pentagon presser wherein an Army spokesman told reporters that 4,000 troops were deployed to Syria, after which he awkwardly walked back the statement less than 30 seconds later, saying "I'm sorry I mispoke there - there are approximately 500 troops in Syria".
And when news broke of the October 4 ambush and deaths of four elite Green Beret soldiers in Niger, the immediate reaction voiced among congressional leaders and echoed generally in the media was: "we have troops in Niger?" - after which it came to light that the US has at least 6,000 military personnel spread across the African continent, though few knew of AFRICOM's (US Africa Command) dangerously burgeoning number of undisclosed daily missions. 
Where are they? Image source: US Marine Corps
“We are not at a point where we can give numbers other than those officially stated,” said Army Col. Rob Manning, quoted in Stripes. Though as Stripes acknowledges it appears that this is due more to the Pentagon simply not knowing where it has stationed thousands of troops rather than the officially stated reasons of "secrecy" and force protection from enemies. The Army spokesman further asserted, “Our commitment is to be as transparent as we can, within the constraints of operation security,” but it's also that case that, "The Pentagon acknowledged in a statement that it has no good way to track how many service members are stationed overseas, where they are and when they were there," according to Stripes.
A Pentagon statement also ambiguously acknowledged that its troop tracking methods will inevitably miscalculate the locations of its roughly 1.3 million total personnel across all branches, based on the worrisome reasoning that "there is no easy way to track all deployments":
“There is no one personnel system in the [Defense Department] that tracks the daily location of all DoD personnel. There is no easy way to track all deployments, training exercises, TDY (being attached to another unit for training or specific missions, typically for less than six months) or temporary assignments,” according to the statement. “If you take the total numbers assigned in the United States and assigned overseas, and add the ‘Unknown,’ you get the total force numbers for each service.”
The report also comes after President Trump unveiled a new Afghan strategy last summer, saying the US would not pull out of the now 16-year long war but would instead inject more troops into the country for increased anti-terror operations. According to recent statements from the Pentagon, the total number of US soldiers in Afghanistan has risen to about 14,000, though accounting procures have been especially unclear concerning the nation's longest running war.
When Secretary of Defense James Mattis was asked during a news conference last summer about troops levels in Afghanistan he said, “There’s a very strange accounting procedure I inherited... What I’m probably going to end up doing is out putting everyone into one thing and saying, ‘Here’s how many are really there now."
And none of this addresses the even greater numbers of civilian contractors in global hot spots where America is present. According to Stripes, "The United States maintains 23,659 contractors in Afghanistan and 4,609 in Iraq, according to a fourth-quarter 2017 report from the Defense Department."
Given that we learned this week of 44,000 troops stationed in locations the Pentagon itself deems "unknown", perhaps we are long overdue for a massive drawback of overseas forces and bloated military budgets? Of course if the Pentagon can't find them in the first place, it might be hard to bring them home.
Thank You Mr Durden and Zerohedge.
