Spending The Pentagon's Money

Pentagon’s Bosses Thwart Accurate Audit Of DOD’s Main Accounting Office -- James Rosen and Marisa Taylor, McClatchy News

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon’s central payroll and accounting office, which pays out tens of billions of dollars a year to U.S. service members and defense contractors worldwide, likes to boast of a decade worth of clean audits by outside firms hired to check its books.

The Defense Finance and Accounting Service was created in 1991 by Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, to help the government’s biggest agency get on top of its spending after President Ronald Reagan had overseen a massive military buildup the previous decade to counter the Soviet Union. Cheney also sought to prevent repeats of the $435 hammers, $37 screws and other embarrassing disclosures of excessive spending.

But more than two decades later – after another big military buildup, this time in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks – a McClatchy investigation has found troubling signs that the system set up to strengthen accountability for Pentagon spending is broken.

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My Comment: It makes you wonder what they are trying to hide.

Bookkeeping Is Not The Specialty Of The US Military

New Pay, Personnel System Dumped As A 'Disaster' -- Montgomery Advertiser

After spending $1 billion and 12 years of effort, Defense officials have pulled the plug on a hapless plan to bring the four military branches under a single, mod­ern payroll and personnel re­cords system.

"This program has been a disaster," Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this month. He said he applauded the deci­sion to kill what proponents said would be the largest, fully-integrated human resource sys­tem in the world.

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My Comment: I knew that the Pentagon accountants were hopeless when it came to calculating budgets for large programs .... but it now appears that they are also hapless when it comes to their own pay.