As Trump Attacks Sanders on "Socialism," Pentagon Audit Shows $10 Trillion Unaccounted For
While Donald Trump in his State of the Union address took a thinly-veiled swipe at Bernie Sanders when he declared that America would never, ever, fall victim to "socialism," analysts were aghast at a recent General Accounting Office report that the Pentagon was forced to make up to $35 trillion in "accounting adjustments," more than the entire size of the US economy, in 2019.
Socialism is just not the American way, declared Trump.
Media describing the report, such as Bloomberg News, carefully stressed that most of this amounted to double, triple, and even quadruple-counting billions from one account to another. "The same money as it got moved between accounts,” according to Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Giving the impression, in the Bloomberg piece, that it pretty much all balanced out, with not much missing. Pentagon spokesman Christopher Sherwood explained "how the dollar figures multiply":
"Sherwood said recognizing $800 million due a contractor in previously unrecorded payments “requires multiple accounting adjustments that net to $0 but could total over $5 billion” in movement between accounts."
But, and here is the big "but," buried in the thirteenth paragraph of the Bloomberg came this, with Sherwood saying:
"What’s most important to an auditor is whether the adjustments “are properly supported” because “properly supported adjustments ensure financial statement values are accurate. We have made significant progress in reducing the number and dollar value of unsupported adjustments by over 30% and 70%, respectively,”FULL ARTICLE
As Trump Attacks Sanders on "Socialism," Pentagon Audit Shows $10 Trillion Unaccounted For | HubPages
