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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

#81

Post by warner25 »

wolverine876 wrote: post #64
warner25 wrote: post #27

Just to provide a ground-level insider perspective: We've been doing things in the name of "audit readiness" for a decade, and I just... don't get it. It has translated to a lot of asinine things like 1. Making sure that everyone's marriage certificates and kids' birth certificates are on-file, to root out maybe the one person in 10,000 who is erroneously getting paid an extra $200 per month for certain entitlements.…

I'm not an insider, but those sound like generally hard-to-avoid issues of large organizations, public and private, profit-oriented and service-oriented. You can't manage that many people, millions in DoD, without rules, and rules can't be defined to apply well to the very wide variety of situations in reality - just like an algorithm, they'll be inflexible. These kind of gripes are, understandably, in every large or…

Yeah, it just seems like we've spent an inordinate amount of time on things that would either (1) save what amounts to peanuts in the context of the Army and DoD budgets or (2) not save any money at all.

I guess the primary purpose of the audit is to make all the numbers add up, and maybe that can inform cost-saving decisions down the road, like you said about warehouse storage space(?).

I'd rather see a number of "elephant in the room" programs ruthlessly cut, or processes changed, to start saving many billions of dollars now.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#82

Post by nradov »

Analemma_ wrote: post #19
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…

> The point is to make gradual improvements every year until they can eventually pass. The Pentagon has been on the GAO's "high risk audit failures" list since 1995 [0]. Exactly how much longer do we need to wait? And at what point can we start to assume they don't intend to ever actually fix the problem? [0]: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105784

What are you proposing exactly? Hire more accountants? Shut down the military until they pass an audit?

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#83

Post by HideousKojima »

intotheabyss wrote: post #60
HideousKojima wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At the cost of some portion of your future revenue

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#84

Post by vuln »

thesuitonym wrote: post #71
wolverine876 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The DoD is Congress' baby. They will move heaven and earth to make sure the defense industry gets paid.

To make sure congress critters get paid by Defense Contractors and secure lucrative board seats.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#85

Post by metabagel »

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.

A better question is whether the percentage of debt to GDP has ever decreased, and it has.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEGDQ188S

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#86

Post by TacticalCoder »

Mistletoe wrote: post #3

Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah, blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of failed empires that had this same idea. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN 32 trillion in debt…

> 32 trillion in debt seems insurmountable, has anything like this ever reversed course historically?

Never and it is insane that there are apologists for such a sad state of affairs.

https://www.usdebtclock.org/

This is not going to end well. That's what happen when totally clueless, incompetent and senile people are pulling the levers, following the advices of visionaries like Paul "it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's" Krugman.

> https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN

What is insane on that graph is that it doubled in ten years and quadrupled in 15 years.

Anyone who thinks this is reasonable is simply out of his mind.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#87

Post by jmyeet »

Mistletoe wrote: post #3

Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah, blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of failed empires that had this same idea. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN 32 trillion in debt…

People like to use the household analogy when it comes to government spending and debt. Some cynically do it to justify cutting social programs. Some (and I include you here) are genuinely confused.

First, literally nobody in government cares about the debt. Of the $32T debt in our entire history, $8T comes from the 4 years of the Trump presidency. Remember that when the next fiscal hawk starts chirping about the need to cut spending.

Second, debt doesn’t matter when you can print money in the currency the debt is denominated in. We borrow US dollars. We print US dollars. So if we’rea household who has to pay out build you can’t ignore it fact that we have a money printer in the next room.

There have been sovereign currency devaluations in the past too, famously by FDR who changed the gold standard.

I would suggest looking up videos on Modern Monetary Theory.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#88

Post by _jal »

Mistletoe wrote: post #3

Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah, blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of failed empires that had this same idea. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN 32 trillion in debt…

To start with, individuals do not print their own currencies. People always jump in immediately to say you can't inflate your way out of debt/look at Argentina/etc., but that's missing the point, I'm not saying that.

The point is a sovereign currency issuer has a fundamentally different relationship to money than mere people. They can certainly still get themselves in trouble through mismanagement, no doubt, but there are a lot of levers they have that are unavailable to normal folks.

Like some other major differences: not too many people have massive standing armies or hundreds of millions of tax payers, or control over a substantial fraction of global financial flows.

Again, not saying eleventy-trillion in debt is not a problem, or that all's well, or anything else like that. I am saying that comparing private finance to sovereign finance is a category error, and things will make much more sense to you if you understand why.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#89

Post by HideousKojima »

ahallock wrote: post #25
Mistletoe wrote: post #3

Can anyone explain to me why it is awful for a person to live in debt but it is okay for the federal government to do so? I've never understood this in the least, other than the "kick the can down the road, America superpower backed by military blah, blah, blah" very weak argument. History is full of the carnage of failed empires that had this same idea. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GFDEBTN 32 trillion in debt…

You can leverage debt as an individual as well. We often shame people for bankruptcies when we shouldn't. Businesses fail all the time and go bankrupt -- running a household is similar and can fail.

Barring difficult to foresee circumstances like an expensive medical procedure, a debilitating injury/illness, or a devastating lawsuit, most of the circumstances that lead to a household going bankrupt are directly attributable to mismanagement.

Re: Pentagon fails audit for sixth year in a row

#90

Post by adamc »

nickpeterson wrote: post #48
bogota wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Part of the problem is, you tend to need cobol experts to actually have any hope of successfully transitioning to another technology, and if we had enough cobol experts would look at the cost of migrating and say, “who needs to, we have a bunch of cobol developers?”

Hire experts and have it be reported as "waste" and hear complaints in Congress about government waste.

We want government to be cheap. You get what you pay for.

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