Remember when the Department of Defense’s own internal auditor revealed that the agency had committed $6.5 trillion in accounting fraud in just one year?
Now, an in-depth investigation into the Pentagon’s crooked accounting in The Nation hints at the full extent of the accounting frauds deployed by the agency that already absorbs two-thirds of all of America’s federal tax revenue, and delves into the methods used by the Pentagon’s bagmen to hide their financial sleights of hand.
The Pentagon’s main goal is to ensure that it never has its budget cut, so it is at pains to disguise any funding surpluses it has at the end of the year. The laundering tactics used to accomplish this are shifting money from “one-year funds” into “five-year funds.” The Pentagon’s other tactics are internally described as “plugs” (which “plug a hole” in a budget) and “nippering” (shifting funds from a Congressionally approved purpose into another one, repeatedly, “until the funds become virtually untraceable”).
The total figures are inconceivably large. From 1998 to 2015, the Pentagon made at least $21 trillion worth of unaccountable transactions (some of these were on the positive side of the ledger) — five times the annual US GDP!
(Similar practices take place in other agencies: for example, HUD also made $351 million in off-books spending in the same period)…..more here