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TRANSPARENCY:

The Pentagon’s New Stealth Bookkeeping

Cleaner Financial Books Apparently Require Some Dirtier Numbers

By Mark Thompson | Filed under analysis | August 24, 2018

Here's a teaser: ". . . Government accountants may “modify” spending levels, the accounting agency says, and allow spending “to be excluded from one reporting entity and consolidated into another reporting entity” to keep work on classified programs secret. . .

Government secrecy sleuth Steven Aftergood revealed this latest Pentagon ledger legerdemain in a recent post on his Secrecy News blog for the Federation of American Scientists. The change is expected to win final approval from Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, and Mick Mulvaney, chief of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), this fall.

The Pentagon announced last December that it was dispatching 1,200 auditors—that’s about two battalions’ worth—to conduct the first-ever across-the-board audit of the Department of Defense. Conflicting accounting systems and programs—and wars—spread over decades make it challenging to track military spending.

The Defense Department’s finances have been an unauditable black hole for decades. But as the military has struggled mightily in recent years to remove the cobwebs and fog from its books, it has run into another problem: where to hide its work on classified programs?
Not to fear: where there’s a will, there’s a waiver. . .
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