ARLINGTON, Virginia. November 15th, 2021. Proudly announcing their self-expected failure to produce a financial audit, the Department of Defense admitted that they are making “steady progress” and “learning” with each failed audit.

Every major government department and their respective agencies are expected to produce a clean audit, showing where all the taxpayer money they receive is spent, not only on operations, but also for payroll, retirement funds and those assets, real estate and more.

Speaking before the final compilation and review of this year’s audit, DoD comptroller Mike McCord says the Department has remedied around 13% the 3,482 issues identified from last year’s audit.

It’s no word of an exaggeration to suggest the Pentagon lives in own its world regarding these audits, with McCord describing one incident, whereby the Navy found $33.5 million out of a total $960 million in lost equipment, as “a return on investment”.

Such incidents highlight the remarkable tendency for the American military spend huge amounts without keeping receipts, and then losing everything they bought.

Feet to the fire

In 2019, Dave Lindorf broke a story at The Nation that the military had been deliberately cooking their accounting books for years, and were unable to provide receipts or evidence of any kind for a whopping $6.5 trillion in Army appropriations for fiscal year 2015, when the Army was afforded just $122 billion.

The piece also included the tale of an incredible $21 trillion fraud that has been going on at the Pentagon for over two decades of deliberate budget obfuscation.

“An army of 1400 auditors hired by us taxpayers for $230 million and borrowed from some of the biggest auditing firms in the country, spent the past year poring through the books and visiting hundreds of operations of the government’s largest and geographically vastest single agency, and came back with word that they couldn’t give it a pass; they couldn’t even figure it out,” Lindorf wrote in a recent opinion piece.

In May 2021 a bipartisan group of Senators passed the “Audit the Pentagon Act,” which included Bernie Sanders and Mike Lee.

NPR notes that while the Pentagon will make excuses and push back potential success dates, every other federal department has satisfied audit requirements since fiscal year 2013, which includes other vast branches like the Dept. of Health and Human Services.

“The Pentagon and the military industrial complex have been plagued by a massive amount of waste, fraud and financial mismanagement for decades. That is absolutely unacceptable,” said Sen. Sanders, (I – VT) whose aid added that the Department couldn’t even come up with an audit of where all its buildings were in the United States alone, foreign bases not included.

The rather straightforward bill, which was introduced in May and remains rotting in committee, simply reads that any Department or attached bureau or agency that can’t provide an audit at the appropriate time should have 1.0% of its budget for the corresponding period taken and placed within a fund to pay down the U.S. deficit.

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