{"id":3884,"date":"2015-08-04T13:14:43","date_gmt":"2015-08-04T19:14:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/?p=3884"},"modified":"2015-08-05T15:13:49","modified_gmt":"2015-08-05T21:13:49","slug":"pentagon-cant-account-for-nearly-1-billion-it-spent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/pentagon-cant-account-for-nearly-1-billion-it-spent\/","title":{"rendered":"Pentagon Can&#8217;t Account for Nearly $1 Billion It Spent"},"content":{"rendered":"<header role=\"banner\">\n<nav role=\"navigation\" aria-label=\"Primary\">\n<div>AUG 3 2015, 5:03 PM ET<\/div>\n<\/nav>\n<\/header>\n<div>\n<article id=\"403291\" data-url=\"http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/news\/us-news\/pentagon-cant-account-nearly-1-billion-n403291\" data-articletype=\"post\" data-next=\"\" data-mpscat=\"news|us-news|article\" data-mpspath=\"\/news\/us-news\/pentagon-cant-account-nearly-1-billion-n403291\" data-mpstype=\"post\" itemscope=\"\" itemtype=\"http:\/\/schema.org\/NewsArticle\">\n<div>\n<header>\n<div>\n<h1>Pentagon Can&#8217;t Account for Nearly $1 Billion It Spent<\/h1>\n<p>by\u00a0JULIA HARTE, CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<p>A version of this story was originally\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicintegrity.org\/2015\/07\/31\/17735\/pentagon-remains-stubbornly-unable-account-its-billions\">published<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.publicintegrity.org\/\">The Center for Public Integrity<\/a>, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n<p>The Secretary of Defense and his top aides made speeches and handed out awards when the department&#8217;s top auditor announced that the Marine Corps had successfully accounted for all the money it received and spent in 2012, marking a key milestone in the Pentagon&#8217;s quest to meet a congressionally imposed deadline for becoming fully auditable by 2017.<\/p>\n<p>But the self-congratulations turned to embarrassment this March, when the auditors&#8217; office suddenly reversed itself and withdrew its endorsement. No one said so at the time, but the Corps had not correctly accounted for roughly $800 million worth of transactions on its books, according to a report the independent Government Accountability Office (GAO) released Tuesday.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.publicintegrity.org\/2015\/07\/31\/17735\/pentagon-remains-stubbornly-unable-account-its-billions\">Click Here to Read the Center for Public Integrity&#8217;s Version of This Story<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Some of these errors were noticed before the department&#8217;s public celebration by a team of auditors in the Pentagon&#8217;s Office of Inspector General, who were supposed to act as watchdogs in the process. But the office&#8217;s management exerted undue influence on the team to approve the audit anyway, and it was approved over the team leaders&#8217; opposition, according to the GAO report and a series of internal emails reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, the shortcomings that specialists have identified in the Marine Corps&#8217;s accounting &#8212; undocumented transactions, unbalanced accounts, and unreliable methods of financial record-keeping &#8212; plague the Defense Department&#8217;s entire accounting apparatus, and threaten its ability to meet the 2017 deadline, according to the new GAO report.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Defense dishes out over $500 billion a year yet still can&#8217;t tell the people where all the money is going,&#8221; complained Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) after reading a draft of the GAO report.<\/p>\n<p>The Pentagon paid an independent accounting firm, Grant Thornton LLP, $32 million to audit the Marine Corps&#8217; financial records, according to Grassley, and it supported the initial certification that the Marine Corps had properly accounted for its revenues and spending. It did not find any mistakes until a year later, according to Pentagon officials and the GAO report.<\/p>\n<p>Michele Mazur, a spokeswoman for the firm, said by email, &#8220;We are confident that our work complied with all professional standards,&#8221; but declined to say if the firm will give its fee back.<\/p>\n<p>The episode is the latest example of the Pentagon&#8217;s continuing inability to accurately track its hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues, assets, liabilities, and spending so it knows when funds are misspent &#8212; a requirement met years ago by every other federal agency.<\/p>\n<p>In written comments included in the GAO report, Ann-Cecile McDermott, the Corps&#8217;s fiscal director, contested that the Corps could not provide support for certain transactions and disputed that &#8220;significant&#8221; weaknesses impair the Corps&#8217;s ability to produce reliable financial information. But she also acknowledged &#8220;much work remains.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mark Easton, the Pentagon&#8217;s deputy chief financial officer, did not contest any specific statements by the GAO but chastised the report&#8217;s authors for not recognizing &#8220;many of the corrections and improvements already made&#8221; by the Marine Corps, and for not &#8220;constructively&#8221; describing the value of the audit to the Marine Corps.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.publicintegrity.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">The Center for Public Integrity<\/a>\u00a0is a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. To read more of their work, go\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.publicintegrity.org\/\">here<\/a>\u00a0or follow them on\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/publici\">Twitter<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>JULIA HARTE, CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>TOPICS\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/news\/us-news\">U.S. NEWS<\/a>,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/news\/investigations\">INVESTIGATIONS<\/a>,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nbcnews.com\/news\/military\">MILITARY<\/a><\/div>\n<div>FIRST PUBLISHED\u00a0<time datetime=\"2015-08-03T20:12:24.000Z\" itemprop=\"datePublished\">AUG 3 2015, 4:12 PM ET<\/time><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>AUG 3 2015, 5:03 PM ET Pentagon Can&#8217;t Account for Nearly $1 Billion It Spent by\u00a0JULIA HARTE, CENTER FOR PUBLIC INTEGRITY A version of this story was originally\u00a0published\u00a0by\u00a0The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C. The Secretary of Defense and his top aides made speeches and handed out awards [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3884"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3906,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3884\/revisions\/3906"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peaceeconomyproject.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}