Quote:The Pentagon's recordkeeping is so bad, it's not possible to audit them.
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2...-Its-Books
We're talking almost a trillion dollars a year for national defense, and we can't track the transactions.
The easiest answer is that Black programs are impossible to audit, because they're secret. You really think a toilet costs $600? When you direct and redirect funds through multiple front programs to protect the fact that many programs even exist at all then you end up with terrible accounting. Yes, many of the tech programs need overhaul, but the ACA roll out shows that to endemic to the government, not just the DoD.
Quote:The easiest answer is that Black programs are impossible to audit, because they're secret. You really think a toilet costs $600? When you direct and redirect funds through multiple front programs to protect the fact that many programs even exist at all then you end up with terrible accounting. Yes, many of the tech programs need overhaul, but the ACA roll out shows that to endemic to the government, not just the DoD.
It's not the black programs that are causing this. It's just plain old bad recordkeeping. Black programs can be accounted for separately. But the basic functions of the DOD should have some decent accounting. It just goes to show, if you want to control the federal budget, the first thing is to figure out where the money is going in the first place. People talk about billions of dollars being wasted, politicians run for office promising to root out waste, fraud, and abuse, but if you can't even track where the money is going, you have no chance of ever getting the budget under control.
Baseline budgeting has the most to do with it. I have seen numerous cases of federal employees being encouraged to spend (waste) money rather than save it.
Quote:Baseline budgeting has the most to do with it. I have seen numerous cases of federal employees being encouraged to spend (waste) money rather than save it.
There is a common practice when people are dealing with budgeted expenditures, for people to spend any excess money, thinking that if they do not, their budget will get cut the next year.
BUT THAT'S NOT THE PROBLEM WE ARE TALKING ABOUT HERE.
The problem is bad record keeping. If they buy stuff, they cannot trace the expenditure back to the basic documents: the invoice, the purchase order, and the paperwork or basic recordkeeping that they actually received what they ordered, and what became of it. All that basic stuff that every business deals with. It's called ACCOUNTING.
They send a few million to a defense contractor for a tank. Did they get the tank? Where is it now? Who authorized the purchase? Did they transfer the correct amount of money to the defense contractor? And so on and so forth. This has nothing to do with black ops, or spending all their budgeted money. It's just basic accounting for the taxpayers' money.
You cannot manage money without complete and accurate accounting. Without that, there's no way to get the federal budget under control.
My bad, yes I did get off topic. I was responding to part of your earlier comment about government waste.