The Pentagon’s poor accounting practices;
In the spring of 2017, Mark Skidmore, an economist at Michigan State University who specializes in public finance, heard what he thought was an erroneous, but interesting, claim: that a Pentagon report indicated the Army had posted $6.5 trillion worth of unsupported accounting adjustments for 2015. He was intrigued, though knowing that the Army’s budget was $122 billion, and that the entire 2015 budget for the Department of Defense (DoD) was $565 billion, he assumed it was an error — the figure was surely “billion,” not “trillion,” already a hefty number for an unaccounted-for adjustment.
To his shock, upon examining the report himself, he found no such error: the figure was $6.5 trillion, fifty-four times the spending authorized by Congress. To investigate the matter further, Skidmore got in touch with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and the person who had made the initial claim that had so shocked Skidmore.
With the help of two graduate students, Skidmore and Fitts trawled through thousands of government reports to find similar unsupported adjustments. They were shocked by what they found: since 1998, the Pentagon logged unsupported adjustments worth at least $21 trillion, while the Department of Housing and Urban Development registered $350 billion worth.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/01/pentagon-budget-government-spending-military