Now this is GOOD! It's one of those titles that needs no more than 6 words and a few little symbols: War on Terror + Enron Accounting = Massive Fraud
But I'll expand on it anyways.
What does the War on Terror and Enron Accounting have to do with Massive FRAUD?
On July 18 2006, the General Accounting Office released a report titled Global War on Terrorism: Observations on Funding, Costs, and Future Commitments. (See link above) This report indicated the government's accounting of the Global War on Terror (GWOT) is at best shoddy. Let's go through the report's main findings to see exactly what is going on.
DOD has reported incremental costs of about $273 billion for overseas GWOT-related activities through April 2006. This amount includes almost $215 billion for operations in Iraq and almost $58 billion for operations in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
This is not chump change - it's a sizeable amount of money.
However, our prior work [the GAO's] has found numerous problems with DOD's processes for recording and reporting costs for GWOT, including longstanding deficiencies in DOD's financial management systems and business processes, the use of estimates instead of actual costs, and the lack of adequate supporting documentation.
The GAO has found major problems. Let me translate the business jargon. "Financial management systems and business processes" is business lingo for how the inner-workings of the Pentagon deal with costs. For example, suppose department A is responsible for buying ammunition. That department would either have an accounting section to deal with the costs or there would be a central accounting section of a larger department that would perform the same function. All of these accounting departments are overseen at some level to make sure all the departments comply with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), communicate with each other using similar terminology etc...
The GAO found that the internal account departments of the DOD had "longstanding deficiencies". This is business talk for "there are REALLY BIG PROBLEMS IN THE WAY WE PERFORM ACCOUNTING". In other words, the DOD is ripe for accounting abuse. Think Enron and you'll get the idea.
YOu ARE going to have to go read Boondad's diary because he explains it so much better than I do. But if it was that easy for a company like Enron to slip in numbers here and there, hide little accounting things behind little accounting tricks, then what makes you think our government hasn't done the same. It is RIPE for abuse and it's had 6 years of neglectful oversight.
This is why we have called for accountablity and oversight.
Click there and read the whole post and then come right back here to comment.
What do you think? Is this ripe for a new Enron? A PUBLICALLY FUNDED Enron?
