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Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

breakingdefense.com

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Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#51

Post by thaumasiotes »

logicchains wrote: post #17
digitalengineer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small correction: it’s awful for a poor person to live in debt. If you are quite wealthy there are lots of ways to borrow money and it’s all good!

>If you are quite wealthy there are lots of ways to borrow money and it’s all good! If you have a negative net worth (more debt than assets) you're generally not considered a wealthy person.

> If you have a negative net worth (more debt than assets) you're generally not considered a wealthy person.

That's only true if your debt and assets are both small. If you have $200 million in assets and $500 million in debt, you will be considered a wealthy person. You would only stop being wealthy if your stuff got taken away.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#52

Post by buerkle »

askonomm wrote: post #18
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I don’t know if what the government is doing is the best long term decision. But the US’s national debt could be compared to a mortgage. And the government’s income is massive so they can be in trillions of debt without it exceeding what they can reasonably pay off (never paying it all off, but paying off individual loans). So by your analogy, is it actually bad for a normal person to be in debt? Normal people hav…

Has the number ever decreased? As in, have they actually paid things off? Without actual numbers, U.S feels increasingly like a high-school bully who borrows money and then threatens with violence when that money is wanted back.

The only time the US was debt free was a few years during Andrew Jackson's presidency.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#53

Post by Yahivin »

encoderer wrote: post #45
MrMetlHed wrote: post #38

Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…

I can imagine a future where new software is, mainly, written by humans while legacy software is maintained by ai. It can take months for a new developer to understand a legacy code base but an LLM with a big enough context window would be instantly productive.

I can imagine the opposite.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#54

Post by vkou »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #10
nradov wrote: post #4

It's important to understand the history here. Failing the audit isn't necessarily due to some sort of fraud or abuse (although there likely are isolated instances). The problem is that for decades Congress never allocated funds to put proper financial controls in place so naturally the accounting systems are a disconnected jumbled mess. When they started annual audits everyone knew they would fail so that was no sur…

Sure, let me use that excuse with the IRS and this how it works.

You're going to make the excuse that your company's accounting mess is because you founded it before the IRS existed?

Good... Luck with that.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#55

Post by encoderer »

Yahivin wrote: post #53
encoderer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can imagine a future where new software is, mainly, written by humans while legacy software is maintained by ai. It can take months for a new developer to understand a legacy code base but an LLM with a big enough context window would be instantly productive.

I can imagine the opposite.

Cool tell me more.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#56

Post by Loughla »

wolverine876 wrote: post #47
blindriver wrote: post #34

Why would anyone care about an audit if there are no repercussions?

Why do you say there are no reprocussions? It's a signicant issue in Congress, which writes all of the Department of Defense's checks, oversees them, investigates them, confirms their leaders, and makes laws controlling everything they do.

And what has failing audits led to in the past?

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#58

Post by toasted-subs »

bogota wrote: post #43
MrMetlHed wrote: post #38

Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…

Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the problem fixes itself really fast. That or start migrating the system. Or more likely they keep using it until it completely breaks and then run to the government for a big handout to fix it. Easy to be irresponsible with other peoples money.

Starting pay for cobol in finance was around 350k last time I glanced. Nobody wants to rewrite a working system which will likely be much more expensive than finding one person to maintain the project.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#59

Post by MrMetlHed »

bogota wrote: post #43
MrMetlHed wrote: post #38

Worked with a guy ten years ago that would obsessively read these reports from the Pentagon. Here's a couple of his stories about the matter: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/pentagon/ and https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-mari... (very old and I apologize for my horrific javascript at the time.) It sounds like nothing has changed. Relevant to this crowd, maybe: "Most of the Cobol code the P…

Start paying 250k a year for cobol developers and the problem fixes itself really fast. That or start migrating the system. Or more likely they keep using it until it completely breaks and then run to the government for a big handout to fix it. Easy to be irresponsible with other peoples money.

In the last part of the series from 2013 we have a chart that shows the Pentagon had spent over $10b modernizing their accounting systems (that was through 2013, no idea how much that number has grown.) I can't imagine anyone would miss a few million of that going to COBOL developers. The money scale for Pentagon projects is mind-boggling to me.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#60

Post by intotheabyss »

HideousKojima wrote: post #22
nxm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debt is also how economies and a lot of companies grow

They could also grow by saving and reinvesting surpluses/profits

The entire point of debt is to bring future revenue to the present so that you don't have to wait for savings to trickle in every year.
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