By Russell Brandon, 11/18/2013
A new report from Reuters has discovered widespread accounting fraud at the Pentagon, describing more than $8 trillion disappearing into a mess of corrupted data, erroneous reports, and unauditable ledgers. Sources from the Department of Finance and Accounting describe the arduous process of squaring the Navy's books with the US Treasury outlays, dealing with obviously inaccurate numbers or entries that were simply left blank. The data usually arrives just two days before deadline, and supervisors direct the office to enter false numbers — known as "plugs" — to square the accounts and conceal the agencies' patchy bookkeeping. The result is fraudulent figures that can reach as high as a trillion dollars in a single year, simply to make the Pentagon books match the Treasury's budget.
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