Why The Pentagon Can't Clean Up Its Accounting

SUCCESS, SORT OF: Workers confer in temporary offices set up in Alexandria, Virginia, for the rollout last year of the Army’s General Fund Enterprise Business System, which, though touted as a success, can’t perform many of the functions is was meant to handle. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Why The Pentagon’s Many Campaigns To Clean Up Its Accounts Are Failing -- Reuters

Part 3: Time and again, programs to modernize Defense Department record-keeping have fallen prey to bureaucratic rivalry, resistance to change and a lack of consequences for failure.

ALEXANDRIA, Virginia - The U.S. Air Force had great expectations for the Expeditionary Combat Support System when it launched the project in 2005. This accountants’ silver bullet, the Air Force predicted a year later, “will fundamentally revolutionize the way the Air Force provides logistics support.”

The new computer-based logistics technology would replace 420 obsolete, inefficient and largely incompatible “legacy” systems with a single, unified means of tracking the hardware of warfare. And it would be done for a mere $1.5 billion, combining three off-the-shelf products from Oracle Corp and modifying them only enough so that they could work together.

Read more ....

Previous Posts:

Part 1: Number Crunch

Part 2: Faking It

My Comment: As a taxpayer .... reading this post will only make you cry.