The DOD has mismanaged $220 billion in equipment provided to contractors despite having a sizable budget. This significant lapse was discovered on Tuesday by a GAO report, which also underlined the urgent need for the Department to take immediate corrective action.
Since 2001, the Pentagon has been vulnerable to accounting mistakes for government-furnished property given to contracting agencies due to an alarming lack of control. Since then, a lot of work has been put into monitoring and cataloging these assets, but little progress has been achieved, increasing the danger to U.S. military operations across the globe.
TRENDING: NEW Trump Diamond Bills Will Drive Liberals Crazy!
“This long-standing issue affects the accounting and reporting of GFP and is one of the reasons DOD is unable to produce auditable financial statements,” stated GAO. DOD is the only significant federal agency that GAO is unable to provide an opinion on its financial statements.
DefenseNews revealed that since 2018, five straight Pentagon audits have failed despite being the biggest federal organization in the US. Contractors were unable to justify spending for 61% of the astonishing $3.5 trillion in assets and liabilities for 2022, which include high-value weaponry and equipment, 2.9 million people, and 643,900 physical assets.
According to GAO, assets include anything given to contractors for usage.
“I would not say that we flunked. The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want,” According to DefenseNews, Pentagon Comptroller Mike McCord made the statement.
According to GAO, the aforementioned property contains the tools required to provide contractors access to the materials they need to make repairs and modifications to weapons.
GAO discovered that the Pentagon must create a different strategy to determine the underlying causes of accounting problems. “department-wide efforts have not been comprehensive and sufficiently detailed.”
“Without such a strategy, DOD is at an increased risk that its efforts to remediate the [government furnished property] material weakness will continue to be insufficient and that it will continue to miss or push back target remediation dates,” the report said.
The Governmental Accountability Office (GAO) estimates the actual amount of useful assets held by the Department of Defense may be significantly greater than the projected $220 billion. In fact, the Army acknowledged only four years ago that their actual number was “unknown”! “quantities may be greatly different than the Army’s documented property records reflect,” the report stated.
The GAO found that proposals to create baseline criteria for government-furnished assets remained unmet after a letter released by the Department of Defense in May 2019. Despite these attempts, DOD has not yet resolved this problem in a meaningful way.
Despite having a thorough strategy in place, poor execution caused communication and logistical problems that prevented success. Although an oversight board was established, it regrettably did not meet often with important parties or deal with underlying issues. The GAO inquiry found that the program encountered a number of obstacles right from the start.
When approached about the situation by the Daily Caller News Foundation, the Department of Defense declined to comment.
They left them in Afghanistan when Joey Baboon tucked tail and ran like hell
not surprized
It’s only gotten worse since I retired 14 years ago yet congress gets a 20% raise and the boarder is overrun. Put guns on the boarder and quit raising taxes to support the inept
Are you surprised? They didn’t lose it. They supplied weapons to somebody. Probably cartel.