TRILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS GONE MISSING. THE PENTAGON TO BE AUDITED FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER

[Butifldrm]

TRILLIONS OF TAXPAYER DOLLARS GONE MISSING. THE PENTAGON TO BE AUDITED FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER

ARJUN WALIADECEMBER 14, 2017

  Share on Facebook  Share on Twitter 

 

 

1.9K

SHARES

  We're creating viewer supported news. Become a member!

I'm in!

Secrecy is the backbone of America. According to some historians’ estimates, each year, more than 500 million pages of documents are classified by the United States alone. The United States has also had a history of government agencies existing in secret for years. The National Security Agency (NSA), for example, was founded in 1952, but its existence was hidden until the mid 1960s.

 

Even more secretive is the National Reconnaissance Office, which was founded in 1960 but remained completely secret for 30 years. On top of that, we’ve had numerous presidents, politicians, and others tell the world a secret government exists that controls both parties and all media, and dictates government policy. The latest to acknowledge this secret group was Vladimir Putin, who described how men provide instruction to the president after they’ve been elected.

The bottom line is that this world of secrecy requires funding. And since these intelligence agencies were completely secret, that funding came from the Black Budget. This money is invested into programs that are completely exempt from disclosure to Congress. When former Canadian Defence Minister Paul Hellyer said “thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which both the Congress and the Commander in Chief have been kept deliberately in the dark,” he wasn’t kidding.

Unfortunately, we don’t hear much about Black Budget programs, or about the people who investigate them. The only mainstream example comes from 2010, when Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin spent two years investigating the Black Budget and concluded that America’s classified world has “become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

This world, where trillions of unaccounted for dollars are probably ending up, is perhaps getting more attention now because, according to the Pentagon’s news service, “The Defense Department is starting the first agency-wide financial audit in its history.”

According to The Free Thought Project, beginning in 1996 all federal agencies were required by law to conduct regular financial audits, but the Pentagon has never complied. This means that, for the past 20 years, it’s never accounted for the the trillions in taxpayer funds it has spent. In fact, a 2013 investigation by Scot Paltrow for Reuters uncovered that the Pentagon has been “fudging” numbers for a long time, and it’s simply considered to be standard procedure.

The Reuters article revealed:

Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s – a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,” Woodford says. “We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”

Again, we are talking about huge sums of unaccounted for money going into programs we know absolutely nothing about. It’s not like there haven’t been any Congressional inquires into it, because this has been an ongoing problem for a couple of decades. Even former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated in July 2016 that “The financial systems of the department of defence are so snarled up that we can’t account for some $2.6 trillion in transactions that exist, if that’s believable.” 

That’s a lot of money.

We have been warned about this before. President Eisenhower was the first to do so, letting the world know before he ended his presidency that there exists a massive potential for the rise of misplaced power.” His predecessor, John F. Kennedy, did the same, saying that there “is a very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment.” He also emphasized that he does not intend to permit this, to the extent that it’s in his control.

What we’re really talking about here are Special Access Programs (SAPs). From these we have unacknowledged and waived SAPs. These programs do not exist publicly, but they do indeed exist. They are better known as ‘Deep Black programs.’ A 1997 U.S. Senate report described them as “so sensitive that they are exempt from standard reporting requirements to the Congress.”

According to Rafael Degennaro, the Director of Audit the Pentagon, over the past 20 years the Pentagon has broken every promise to Congress about when an audit would happen.

They’ve responded by claiming the audit is going to start right away, and will now occur annually.

But can these audits be trusted? After so much controversy, secrecy, and law-breaking, how can we trust these audits will square the books? It’s obvious this money has gone into programs that the world knows nothing about.

NPR is reporting that the Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General has “hired independent public accounting firms to conduct audits of individual components — the Army, Navy, Air Force, agencies, activities and more — as well as a departmentwide consolidated audit to summarize all results and conclusions.”  This is according to the official DoD News agency.

How do we know that the U.S. government branch responsible for the audit will not be in “cahoots” with or influenced by the Pentagon, or the tremendous power the Deep State has amassed?

The point is to recognize that our own money has been used to fund projects that nobody really knows anything about, most likely benefitting the few, to the cost of many.

The human race is going through a massive transition, and one part of that transition is becoming aware of the secrecy that’s plagued our world, and the massive potential the human race really has to change it, and create an experience where all life can thrive. This isn’t possible without transparency. Transparency is necessary, as it helps us identify problems so we can begin creating solutions and moving past experiences in our system that no longer resonate with us, the collective.

 

http://www.collective-evolution.com/2017/12/14/after-trillions-of-dollars-go-missing-unaccounted-for-the-dod-is-getting-audited-for-the-first-time-ever/

[Butifldrm]

Forbes Magazine: 21 Trillion Missing from U.S. Treasury

Posted on December 10, 2017 by Ann Kreilkamp

This morning, I open emails to see what’s posted below. All of which makes me realize, again, that we need to learn how to live, as much as possible, below money. Let us recognize “money” as an artificial, scarcity-promoting, hierarchical scrim humanity has created to smother Nature’s abundance, her dynamically interwoven web of life. 

Forbes magazine just yesterday became the first major media to blow the lid off of $21 trillion that have gone missing from the US treasury. The entire article is copied below. To give an idea of how much money that is, if you divide the entire US population of around 325 million into $21 trillion, the amount missing is equivalent to $65,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

CBS News in 2002 was the first to report on the much smaller amount of $2.3 trillion missing from the Pentagon, as acknowledged by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in a report on the Dept. of Defense website. Rumsfeld’s report was later strangely removed from the website, but is still available on the Internet archive.

No other media picked up on this mind-blowing story. What should have been a top headline-grabbing story of highest concern to all Americans was simply dropped. Since then, a few major media have published isolated articles on missing trillions, as summarized on this revealing webpage, yet again, these stories were not given the top headlines they deserved. They thus attracted little notice and were dropped, so the public remained uniformed of this concerning news.

A courageous former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under George H. W. Bush by the name of Catherine Austin Fitts couldn’t believe this vitally important story was being largely ignored by the media. An incredibly sharp economist who once served as managing director of the Wall Street investment bank Dillon, Read & Co, Fitts researched further and has been reporting regularly on the many trillions missing on her highly informative and inspiring website solari.com. The media has conspicuously avoided her detailed work on this.

Michigan State professor of economics Mark Skidmore discovered the excellent work of Fitts several years ago. He couldn’t believe Fitts claim that $6.5 trillion were missing from the US government. Thinking she had mistakenly written trillions instead of billions, he and his graduate students sifted through thousands of US government reports and were astounded to find not only that Fitts was right, but that the amount was even greater that Fitts had thought.

Skidmore eventually worked together with Forbes magazine contributor Prof. Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University to compose the below article blowing the lid off this huge cover-up of $21 trillion gone missing from government coffers. Note that once certain officials saw Skidmore exposing this, the government removed many of the incriminating documents from their websites. But he wisely had downloaded all of the documents and has reposted this incriminating information on the website of Fitts on this webpage.

You can help to inform the public of this huge cover-up by spreading this news to all of your friends and colleagues. It’s time for us to join in demanding full transparency on how our tax dollars are used and to expose the major corruption taking place. See the “What you can do” section below the article for more ways you can make a difference. Thanks for caring. Together, we can build a brighter future for us and our children.

With best wishes for a transformed world,
Fred Burks for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
Former White House interpreter and whistleblower
December 9, 2017

Note: Watch Prof. Skidmore discussing this astounding news in this interview.

Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?
By Laurence Kotlikoff
Forbes magazine, Dec 8, 2017

I am co-authoring this column with Mark Skidmore, a Professor of Economics at Michigan State University.

“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”. The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments.

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.”

(Note, after Mark 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 Ms. Venable about OIG’s disclosure of unsubstantiated adjustments, but she has not responded.)

Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress. The July 2016 report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department’s “failure to correct system deficiencies.” The result, according to the report, is that data used to prepare the year-end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail.

The report 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. There is no explanation concerning why they were removed nor their magnitude.

The July 2016 report states, “In addition, DFAS (Defense Finance and Accounting Service) Indianapolis personnel did not document or support why DDRS (The Defense Department Reporting System) removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million feeder file records during the Third Quarter.”

An appendix to the July 2016 report shows $2 trillion in changes to the Army General Fund balance sheet due to unsupported adjustments. On the asset side, there is $794 billion increase in the Army’s Fund Balance with the U.S. Treasury. There is also an increase of $929 billion in the Army’s Accounts Payable.

This information raises additional major questions. First, what is the source of the additional $794 billion in the Army’s Fund Balance? This adjustment represents more than six times appropriated spending. Second, do these transfers represent a flow of funds to the Army beyond those authorized by Congress? Third, were these funds authorized and if so when and by whom? Fourth, what is the source of these funds? Finally, the $929 billion in Accounts Payable appears to represent an amount owed for items or services purchased on credit. What entities have received or will receive payment?

Note: The above article is copied from the Forbes magazine website on this webpage.Watch Prof. Skidmore discussing this astounding news in this interview.

 

http://www.exopermaculture.com/2017/12/10/forbes-magazine-21-trillion-missing-u-s-treasury/