Truth or Fiction: US Army Cannot Count Money
August 24, 2016
I believe everything I read on the Internet. When the information comes from a real journalism type outfit, I am no Doubting Thomas. I wish to point out that the write up “US Army Fudged Its Accounts by Trillions of Dollars, Auditor Finds” strikes me as fiction. Just to keep the math straight, here’s a summary of numbers:
- 1,000 is one thousand
- 10,000 is ten one thousands
- 100,000 is ten ten thousands
- Let’s jump up a bit.
- One million is 1,000,000
- A billion is 1,000,000,000
- A trillion is 1,000,000,000,000.
In Zimbabwe there was a $10 trillion dollar bill. So misplacing a bill is easy to do:
My recollection from my days at Booz, Allen is that most humanoids have difficult with quantities over 1,000. Imagine what happens when one has to think about trillions or a one followed by 12 zeros.
If the write up is on the money, the US Army is composed of individuals who cannot deal with big numbers or money. I learned:
The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.
How can a US federal entity make up numbers? The Department of Defense is into Windows and Excel. The US Army has a fancy data aggregation and analysis system called Distributed Common Ground or DCGS-A.
The write up stated:
The report affirms a 2013 Reuters series revealing how the Defense Department falsified accounting on a large scale as it scrambled to close its books. As a result, there has been no way to know how the Defense Department – far and away the biggest chunk of Congress’ annual budget – spends the public’s money. The new report focused on the Army’s General Fund, the bigger of its two main accounts, with assets of $282.6 billion in 2015. The Army lost or didn’t keep required data, and much of the data it had was inaccurate, the IG said.
I was surprised an auditor was able to assemble the needed information. I highlighted this statement from the source article:
The IG report also blamed DFAS [Defense Finance and Accounting Service] , saying it too made unjustified changes to numbers. For example, two DFAS computer systems showed different values of supplies for missiles and ammunition, the report noted – but rather than solving the disparity, DFAS personnel inserted a false “correction” to make the numbers match. DFAS also could not make accurate year-end Army financial statements because more than 16,000 financial data files had vanished from its computer system. Faulty computer programming and employees’ inability to detect the flaw were at fault, the IG said.
Trillions. Hmmm. Why not put DCGS-A on the forensic team? If that system does not work, why not let Palantir Gotham have a go at figuring out where the money went? Another option is IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook, right?
Yes, government integrity. There’s a Web site for that too: https://www.oge.gov/.
Did you know that?
Stephen E Arnold, August 24, 2016
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Truth or Fiction: US Army Cannot Count Money : Stephen E. Arnold @ Beyond Search