Following the Money
DoD audit? Missing helicopters? $830 Million in missing helicopters? 39 Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters? And the Air Force identified 478 structures and buildings at 12 installations that were missing on the books? And 44,000 troops also came up missing? This sounds like a private military to me. I can’t get out of my head that Dick Cheney fought against auditing the DoD because he knew how expensive the audit would be, an estimated $918 Million, or was it because they knew where they were hiding misappropriation of funds. Funny how the audit costs more than 39 Black Hawks. When I was in the military, we used to leave something simple behind for inspectors to find so they were satisfied they had thoroughly inspected us. If they don’t find ANYTHING, then they’ll keep looking until they do. So you leave a red herring behind for something small and they don’t find anything big. With a budget as large as the DoD, $582.7 Billion in 2017 with over $2.4 Trillion in assets, $830 Million is a RED HERRING! The helicopters were probably never delivered, just a line item in the accounting of where the money goes and then just rubber-stamped. Why would anyone question $830 Million in helicopters when you have Billions going out. A lot less embarrassing than $1500 toothbrushes. Additionally, the audit was done by 1200 auditors for a $582 Billion/yr “company” with over $2.4 Trillion in assets? We put that many auditors on a bank audit in Puerto Rico in 2007 and the audit took almost a year and a half and the bank only did $545 Million/yr in revenue with only $10 Billion in assets. REALLY?
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….Grassley said the Defense Finance and Accounting Service and the inspector general’s office both failed in their roles….“The outside audit firm rubber-stamped DFAS’ practices using defective audit methods,” a draft of Grassley’s report concludes. “For its part, the (inspector general) was prepared to call foul on (the accounting firm) for substandard work but was somehow steamrolled by DFAS. The IG failed to do its job.” - James Rosen and Marisa Taylor - McClatchy Washington Bureau 11/22/13. ledger-enquirer.com/news/nation-world/national/article29313628.html
Going even deeper into the rabbit hole, Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics at MSU specializing in public finance, found the Department of Defense and Housing & Urban Development may have spent as much as $21 trillion on mysterious items between 1998 and 2015. – Tyler Durden, 1/11/18, zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-11/army-finds-830-million-missing-helicopters-first-ever-audit-begins
QNote: Rabbit Hole.