Government Bookkeeping: The Pentagon Cannot Account For $21 Trillion

Leave it to the government to break the very rules they themselves have put into place. The Pentagon is supposed to keep an accounting record of monetary transactions, yet they can’t account for $21 trillion of spent money.

For the fiscal year of 2015 alone, the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments, according to Forbes. That’s not exactly in line with the rules they laid out for themselves:

“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” ~ Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, The US Constitution

On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported.” According to the GAO’s Comptroller General, “Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions. For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly.”

Mark Skidmore, a professor of economics at Michigan State University began looking into the OIG report and the trillions in unaccounted for money spent by the Pentagon. Not long after Skidmore began inquiring about OIG-reported unsubstantiated adjustments, the OIG’s webpage, which documented, albeit in a highly incomplete manner, these unsupported “accounting adjustments,” was mysteriously taken down. Fortunately, Mark copied the July 2016 report and all other relevant OIG-reports in advance and reposted them here. Mark has repeatedly tried to contact Lorin Venable, Assistant Inspector General at the Office of the Inspector General. He has emailed, phoned, and used LinkedIn to ask Venable about OIG’s disclosure of unsubstantiated adjustments, but she has not responded.

Given that the entire Army budget in the fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress. And people are constantly wondering why they are forced to pay such a high tax rate and live paycheck to paycheck while the military industrial complex continues to grow.

Forbes broke down the OIG report. It indicates that just 170 transactions accounted for $2.1 trillion in year-end unsupported adjustments. No information is given about these 170 transactions. In addition, many thousands of transactions with unsubstantiated adjustments were, according to the report, removed by the Army.

Skidmore and Catherine Austin Fitts, former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, conducted a search of government websites and found similar reports dating back to 1998. While the documents are incomplete, original government sources indicate $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported for the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015.

http://www.thedailysheeple.com/government-bookkeeping-the-pentagon-cannot-account-for-21-trillion_052018

Killer Mike, Bill Maher Call Out Gun Control Hypocrisy, If Trump is ‘Hitler’ Why Give Him All the Guns?

https://thefreethoughtproject.com/killer-mike-bill-maher-gun-control/

'With friends like that who needs enemies’: Tusk lashes out at Trump

European Council President Donald Tusk derided US President Donald Trump over his administration’s “capricious assertiveness” and called on the EU to unite on the Iran nuclear agreement and tariffs.

Speaking at a Western Balkans summit in Sofia, Bulgaria on Wednesday, Tusk didn’t hold back in his assessment of the US, saying EU members should unite to face “a new phenomenon - the capricious assertiveness of the American administration.”

Tusk pointed to some of Trump’s latest decisions before concluding, “someone could even think with friends like that, who needs enemies.” He also suggested the EU owes Trump a debt of gratitude for helping Europe to drop “all illusions”.

Tusk’s comments come amid increasingly souring relations between the EU and US, over trade disagreements, the Iran nuclear deal, and the US Embassy’s relocation to Jerusalem.

The US has found itself at odds with much of Europe following its decision to pull out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal signed between Iran and the EU, Russia, China, and the US. Despite Trump slamming it as a “terrible deal” before and after taking office, his European counterparts lobbied him not to leave the agreement.

With Trump’s cabinet being increasingly populated by the likes of National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who have long pushed for regime change in Iran, the US position is becoming more at odds with those of Europe, Russia, and China.

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The US decision to move its embassy in Israel to the disputed city of Jerusalem and its response to the killing of 60 Palestinians at protests in Gaza on Monday has further alienated the US from its European allies, who have spoken out on Israel’s actions. Tusk highlighted the “dramatic events in Gaza” in a letter sent to the European Council before the summit on Tuesday.

The EU reiterated its “clear, consolidated” position on Israel-Palestine on Monday, which calls for a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders with “Jerusalem as capital of both [states].”

The EU is also unimpressed by Trump’s decision to place tariffs on European steel and aluminium as part of his ‘America first’ agenda. Tusk said he wanted Europe to “stick to our guns” and described Trump’s justification of tariffs on the basis of national security as “absurd.”

“The EU and US are friends and partners, therefore US tariffs cannot be justified on the basis of national security,” Tusk said. “We need to bring back reality in this discussion, which is not the case today.”

Tusk added that Europe must protect the “transatlantic bond,” but be prepared to act on its own, with “more political unity and determination.”

Evidence of the EU acting independently is already in play, as the EU and Iran agreed on a 9-point economic plan to protect the nuclear agreement on Wednesday. The aim is to counter Trump’s reimposition of sanctions on Iran.

https://www.rt.com/news/426902-trump-tusk-eu-assertiveness/