Penta-gone Cash
$9 Billion "unaccounted for" dollars out of $105 Billion spent for the year means that roughly 8% of the money spent in Iraq and Afghanistan just went away.
Who is responsible for tracking this stuff for the Pentagon and the people spending the money in the field? These stories always seem to have all the depressing math and none of the relevant operation behind those numbers. Its as if congress allocates money and it goes into some magical fantasy land of accountability where nobody cares or knows how it gets spent.
This is unacceptable and has been a staple of military spending forever.
The bigger story here really though is not limited to Iraq. The excuse given by the Pentagon that it lost track of the money because the situation was so crazy in Iraq is complete hogwash. Is the Pentagon any better at keeping track of money it spends from the hostile warzone of Alexandria? Hells no!
The GAO ranks the Pentagon as the worst government agency for accounting. In 2000 the pentagon's own inspector general found it could not account for $1 Trillion (T! Trillion).
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript245_full.html
Sounds like crazy liberal propaganda, but even Donald Rumsfeld has discussed the problem:
"More money for the Pentagon, CBS News Correspondent Vince Gonzales reports, while its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.
"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.
$2.3 trillion -- that's $8,000 for every man, woman and child in America. To understand how the Pentagon can lose track of trillions, consider the case of one military accountant who tried to find out what happened to a mere $300 million.
"We know it's gone. But we don't know what they spent it on," said Jim Minnery, Defense Finance and Accounting Service."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/01/29/eveningnews/main325985.shtml
So $9 Billion dollars is chump change in Pentagon cash and represents the tip of an enormous iceberg of government waste.
If there is going to be a Truman Commission, it must address the Pentagon's ridiculous accounting standards.
| 
