Pentagon To Undergo An Audit -- In 2017? Maybe?

Click here for an article entitled Calls Grow for Pentagon Audit at Defense Industry Daily: Military Purchasing News For Defense Procurement Managers And Contractors.

It’s not that the US Department of Defense fails audits. The problem is more fundamental: it is not currently possible to audit it, and any comprehensive audit would be a first-ever event in modern times.

Thieves of the Pentagon, by Saul Landau at CounterPunch, details an astonishing amount of waste and fraud by the American military establishment. Edited for brevity, emphasis added:

The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) ... concluded that 8 and 1/2 years of US fighting and occupation of Iraq has achieved neither success nor sustainability. Indeed, “Iraq remains an extraordinarily dangerous place,” concluded the Job-inspired Inspector. (Michael Shank, Guardian, August 6, 2011)

SIGIR also reports that financial abuses have abounded ... the once fiscally frugal Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned that defense cuts would weaken the country. Leave us open to an attack from Mars?

One SIGIR example sites Anham, a company that charges the government $4,500 for a $183 circuit breaker (at an appliance store) and $900 for a $7 control switch. (Shank) We can relate to these figures as opposed to billions of dollars spent on R & D for new weapons systems, super stealth jets and ever more lethal bombers. (How else to defend against 19 Saudi suicidal maniacs with box cutters?)

The shenanigans began long before those wars. A March 2000 Inspector General report concluded that the Pentagon could not trace nearly one third of the accounting entries in its $7.6 billion budget. Not traceable, the Pentagon reported.

In 2005, Congress “fixed” the problem by excusing the Defense Department from spending money on an audit -— until the Defense Secretary submitted a plan to improve financial management. Congress gave the Pentagon until 2017 to finish its audit, but in 2010, “Pentagon officials stated that meeting the 2017 timeline may not be realistic and the agency may need more money from Congress to achieve full auditability.”

In July, the House included [Congressman, D-OR) DeFazio’s “audit the Pentagon” amendment in the Defense appropriation bill. “The Pentagon has spent more than $10 trillion since 1990 and will spend over $4 trillion over the next four years without ever passing an audit,” said DeFazio. “There is no reason that the largest and most expensive agency in the federal government should hide its financial books from scrutiny.”

On August 31, AP ran the following: “As much as $60 billion in U.S. funds has been lost to waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade through lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption, an independent panel investigating U.S. wartime spending estimates.”