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I'd believe the former article, since the quote you posted from the latter is far beyond any yearly budget even mathematically possible. You quoted "Yet DoD fi

I'd believe the former article, since the quote you posted from the latter is far beyond any yearly budget even mathematically possible. You quoted "Yet DoD financial records for the Army’s 2015 budget included a whopping $6.5 trillion (yes, trillion) in plugs." The entire US annual federal budget is on order of 4 trillion. So that number alone is fearmongering. Total DoD annual budget is around $700B. Army is a fraction of that. A significant amount of the money is simply paying the 2.8 million DoD employees, another decent portion is benefits to retirees, another is equipment maintenance and purchases , and none of these are places you can simply lose all or much of the money - employees notice when they don't get paychecks. So the 6.5 trillion in a single year plugs is either nonsense or seriously misreported in the latter article. Another way to see it - the article says Congress allocated $122B on 2015 for Army. At that rate Army would take 60+ years to have 6.5T in funny money floating around, and that only if it was not paying anyone for anything else, and that requires them to get 122B a year for the past 60 years, which they did not (60 years ago total DoD budget budget was ~50B, Army was a small fraction of that). Thus it's easy to see the article is some mix of lying, ignorance, miscounting, multiple counting, or other nonsense. It's mathematically impossible for Army to have misplaced or hidden or defrauded that much money. Care to explain their math while tying it down to actual budget numbers?

phonon 7y ago
I'm guessing those were positive and negative fudge factors. Most cancelled out, but the end result is the footnote level corrections are larger in absolute magnitude than the underlying budget, making it very difficult to parse (imagine if you had so much monkey patching nothing of the original code base remained).
jessaustin 7y ago
If you will believe DoD, and we'll understand if you won't, you'll find the $6.5T figure on page "i" of this document. [0] (click through soon, because they take down these embarrassing reports all the time!) Of course the gigantic figure is nonsense, but that indicts DoD accounting rather than the journalists who've noticed its shabby nature. By producing meaningless numbers, the accountants have completely obscured what's really going on, in violation of Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution. [0] https://media.defense.gov/2016/Jul/26/2001714261/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2016-113.pdf https://media.defense.gov/2016/Jul/26/2001714261/-1/-1/1/DOD...
- ChrisLomont 7y ago
  Here's a pretty good explanation of why the 6.5T is nonsense when implied that is the amount of fraud. It also tracks the source of these "estimates", noting that they are not what your article implies. Turns out it is double counting and adding future liabilities. https://www.metabunk.org/threads/debunked-missing-21-trillion-6-5-trillion-2-3-trillion-journal-vouchers.9718/ https://www.metabunk.org/threads/debunked-missing-21-trillio...
- ChrisLomont 7y ago
  And here is the same audit done in 2018, again from the Inspector General (your report was 2016). It's the most recent followup to your report, which is now outdated. Seems the 6.5T must have evaporated. As expected. This is why using simple smell tests to raise suspicion is worth noting. https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/08/2002077454/-1/-1/1/UNDERSTANDING%20THE%20RESULTS%20OF%20THE%20AUDIT%20OF%20THE%20DOD%20FY%202018%20FINANCIAL%20STATEMENTS.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/08/2002077454/-1/-1/1/UND...
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    Just look at the first page of each document. The one I linked clearly states on page "i" both an Objective and a Finding ("did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter journal voucher (JV) adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend"). Your document neither addresses this issue nor does it include any stated objective nor does it include any stated findings. No one who even skimmed this document would suspect it even addresses this topic. We can't just assume, as you would like to do, that a massive problem of long standing would just disappear in a couple of years. No one thinks that the Pentagon stole $6.5T in one year. The fact that the $6.5T figure appears anywhere on Pentagon account books is the problem. When "adjustments" with no reasonable explanation overwhelm real assets and transactions, the accounts are without meaning. In such a situation, we can be sure that lots of resources are being diverted to unapproved purposes, even if those diversions don't tally to the trillions. (Although, when the budget is 3/4 of a trillion per year, it's not going to take long to get there.) Frankly you seem to be arguing with straw men. Why is that? Do you have any professional experience with accounting? Have you ever produced a balance sheet? Have you ever read one?
_jal 7y ago
> Thus it's easy to see the article is some mix of lying, ignorance, miscounting, multiple counting, or other nonsense This reminds me of an economics joke. A professor and a student are walking across campus. The student points to the ground and says, "Look! a $20 bill!" Without looking, the professor says, "Nonsense! If there were, someone would have picked it up." > Care to explain their math while tying it down to actual budget numbers? Since you don't seem to sully your assumptions with facts, no, I don't care to. You can stop reading here and just keep on being right all the time. If anyone reading along is confused, here's some copy-paste from the article that could have saved the parent poster time and mockery: Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: So-called “one-year money”—funds that Congress intends to be spent in a single fiscal year—gets shifted into a pool of five-year money. This maneuver exploits the fact that federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money” during that five-year allocation period. The phony numbers are referred to inside the Pentagon as “plugs,” as in plugging a hole, said current and former officials. “Nippering,” a reference to a sharp-nosed tool used to snip off bits of wire or metal, is Pentagon slang for shifting money from its congressionally authorized purpose to a different purpose. Such nippering can be repeated multiple times “until the funds become virtually untraceable,” says one Pentagon-budgeting veteran who insisted on anonymity in order to keep his job as a lobbyist at the Pentagon." [...] In other words, there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent. Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion had been “removed,” the inspector general’s office reported.
- ChrisLomont 7y ago
  Again, this implies that Army spent 6.5 trillion, and I quote "there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent". Army has received far less than that in total money in their entire history, which is very easy to check. So which is incorrect? The article? Or every other place you can check historical US federal budgets? >no, I don't care to. I suspected as much. It's trivial to check this number is nonsense.

phonon 7y ago

I'm guessing those were positive and negative fudge factors. Most cancelled out, but the end result is the footnote level corrections are larger in absolute magnitude than the underlying budget, making it very difficult to parse (imagine if you had so much monkey patching nothing of the original code base remained).

jessaustin 7y ago

If you will believe DoD, and we'll understand if you won't, you'll find the $6.5T figure on page "i" of this document. [0] (click through soon, because they take down these embarrassing reports all the time!) Of course the gigantic figure is nonsense, but that indicts DoD accounting rather than the journalists who've noticed its shabby nature. By producing meaningless numbers, the accountants have completely obscured what's really going on, in violation of Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution. [0] https://media.defense.gov/2016/Jul/26/2001714261/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2016-113.pdf https://media.defense.gov/2016/Jul/26/2001714261/-1/-1/1/DOD...

ChrisLomont 7y ago
Here's a pretty good explanation of why the 6.5T is nonsense when implied that is the amount of fraud. It also tracks the source of these "estimates", noting that they are not what your article implies. Turns out it is double counting and adding future liabilities. https://www.metabunk.org/threads/debunked-missing-21-trillion-6-5-trillion-2-3-trillion-journal-vouchers.9718/ https://www.metabunk.org/threads/debunked-missing-21-trillio...
ChrisLomont 7y ago
And here is the same audit done in 2018, again from the Inspector General (your report was 2016). It's the most recent followup to your report, which is now outdated. Seems the 6.5T must have evaporated. As expected. This is why using simple smell tests to raise suspicion is worth noting. https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/08/2002077454/-1/-1/1/UNDERSTANDING%20THE%20RESULTS%20OF%20THE%20AUDIT%20OF%20THE%20DOD%20FY%202018%20FINANCIAL%20STATEMENTS.PDF https://media.defense.gov/2019/Jan/08/2002077454/-1/-1/1/UND...
- jessaustin 7y ago
  Just look at the first page of each document. The one I linked clearly states on page "i" both an Objective and a Finding ("did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in third quarter journal voucher (JV) adjustments and $6.5 trillion in yearend"). Your document neither addresses this issue nor does it include any stated objective nor does it include any stated findings. No one who even skimmed this document would suspect it even addresses this topic. We can't just assume, as you would like to do, that a massive problem of long standing would just disappear in a couple of years. No one thinks that the Pentagon stole $6.5T in one year. The fact that the $6.5T figure appears anywhere on Pentagon account books is the problem. When "adjustments" with no reasonable explanation overwhelm real assets and transactions, the accounts are without meaning. In such a situation, we can be sure that lots of resources are being diverted to unapproved purposes, even if those diversions don't tally to the trillions. (Although, when the budget is 3/4 of a trillion per year, it's not going to take long to get there.) Frankly you seem to be arguing with straw men. Why is that? Do you have any professional experience with accounting? Have you ever produced a balance sheet? Have you ever read one?

_jal 7y ago

> Thus it's easy to see the article is some mix of lying, ignorance, miscounting, multiple counting, or other nonsense This reminds me of an economics joke. A professor and a student are walking across campus. The student points to the ground and says, "Look! a $20 bill!" Without looking, the professor says, "Nonsense! If there were, someone would have picked it up." > Care to explain their math while tying it down to actual budget numbers? Since you don't seem to sully your assumptions with facts, no, I don't care to. You can stop reading here and just keep on being right all the time. If anyone reading along is confused, here's some copy-paste from the article that could have saved the parent poster time and mockery: Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: So-called “one-year money”—funds that Congress intends to be spent in a single fiscal year—gets shifted into a pool of five-year money. This maneuver exploits the fact that federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money” during that five-year allocation period. The phony numbers are referred to inside the Pentagon as “plugs,” as in plugging a hole, said current and former officials. “Nippering,” a reference to a sharp-nosed tool used to snip off bits of wire or metal, is Pentagon slang for shifting money from its congressionally authorized purpose to a different purpose. Such nippering can be repeated multiple times “until the funds become virtually untraceable,” says one Pentagon-budgeting veteran who insisted on anonymity in order to keep his job as a lobbyist at the Pentagon." [...] In other words, there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent. Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion had been “removed,” the inspector general’s office reported.

ChrisLomont 7y ago
Again, this implies that Army spent 6.5 trillion, and I quote "there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent". Army has received far less than that in total money in their entire history, which is very easy to check. So which is incorrect? The article? Or every other place you can check historical US federal budgets? >no, I don't care to. I suspected as much. It's trivial to check this number is nonsense.