Pentagon fails audit. Again.
I am starting to feel like William Proxmire, who annually handed out Golden Fleeces for wasteful government spending. Mid November, the predictable column comes out – the Pentagon failed its audit…again. It’s not like we haven’t noticed ’em before – we even congratulated the Marines for being the first service to pass an audit in February.
But yeah, as a whole DoD failed its audit like Kamala taking a MENSA entrance exam.
The Pentagon failed its seventh consecutive audit on Friday as the agency was unable to fully account for its massive $824 billion budget, though officials were confident the Department of Defense “has turned a corner” in understanding its budgetary challenges going forward.
“Turned a corner” – from blissful ignorance to knowing they piss money away with no clue?
The audits resulted in a disclaimer of opinion, which means auditors were provided with insufficient information to form an accurate opinion of the accounts.
Of the Department of Defense’s (DoD) 28 reporting entities that had standalone audits, 9 received an unmodified audit opinion, 1 received a qualified opinion, 15 received disclaimers, and 3 opinions remain pending, the Pentagon said.
Translation: over half the reporting entities can’t even provide meaningful data.
Michael McCord, Under Secretary of Defense (Comptroller) and Chief Financial Officer, said the agency “has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges.”
McCord told reporters at a briefing on Friday that he would not say that the agency “failed” as it had “about half clean opinions.”
“So if someone had a report card that is half good and half not good, I don’t know that you call the student or the report card a failure,” he said. Fox News
Uh, Mike? Y’all have been trying to get a clean audit since 2017, and have failed. Your “half good” number of 13 out of 28 shows you can make meaningful commentary to make an opinion, not that the opinion is favorable. Think of it like this: you are manufacturing a part with hole with a tolerance of +/- .010″. With good data you could say you are making the part with hole tolerances of 3″… still a crap part but you would know, right? What you have, Mikey, is being unable to say whether your tolerance is .010″ or one foot. What kind of failure is that?
And just as a balm for your wounds…DoDs budget will break a trillion dollars before the Pentagon estimates they will get a decent audit in 2028.
Hat tip to Combat Sue. It was a privilege serving with you.
Category: "Teh Stoopid", "Your Tax Dollars At Work"
But the REALLY IMPORTANT stuff to the current crowd in charge like DEI and SHARP training are up to date, right? Just asking for a friend.
Trump and Elon to the rescue:
P.S. No, I’m not being sarcastic– career and likely “woke” bureaucrats see them as the above and, good, because they’ll kick said upset bureaucrats out on the street.
The DoD knows how much it spends, knows how much it has allocated to budget programs, and knows when it did so.
Everything after that is a black hole. Once Commanders and PEOs receive their budgets, no one makes even the slightest attempt to keep the books. That doesn’t matter anyway, all that matters is that the money be spent.
Weirdly, every penny spent has to be reported up the chain, including what it was spent for. What happens to that reporting?
It is not so much fraud as sheer stupidity and corruption.
If you don’t spend all of it then you obviously don’t need that
much so next budget allocation will reflect the difference and
tout it as savings.
Until the budget can be accounted for and balanced, GOs/FOs should be fired (not retired) and programs shut down.
But continue paying the troops, they are the basic bread and butter of our military
There it is. I remember fondly a number of decades ago when they shitcanned over 100 flag rank officers who were redundant. You can pay a whole lotta privates for that kind of money, and they do the work.
Speaking of said GO and FO positions, I wonder how many of them are used in the “Good ‘Ole Boy” System to keep one’s Pals around?
It cannot be that hard if every unit in the military keeps track of its stuff like we had to. At both Radio Battalions, we had all kinds of radio gear, crypto gear, rolling stock etc, and we accounted for it annually. Or no one went home till we did.
You are confusing difficulty with lack of will. All things are hard if you absolutely do not want to do them or see them done.
Even in the NG, NOBODY goes home from Drill Weekend until the Sensitive Items Inventory is done and signed off on!
I’m not surprised by this and less disappointed by it than some. During GWOT our comm teams setup sites all over the MidEast and some of our gear got left behind as part of the critical infrastructure. Turn over of that gear to the follow-on units sometimes did not go as smooth as needed for various reasons. Getting those items “off our books” to the other gaining units sometimes took an act of God. I spent waaaay too much time working property book issues from our past & current deployments as a maintenance (& later unit) super but it had to be done. Considering the screwed up situation from the Afghan withdrawal, the continued chaos in Iraq/Syria plus the back & forth of our units supporting Israel… I’m not surprised at all by this.
Concerned – yes – but not surprised.
Send in the agents from D.O.G.E.
If an Officer of any rank is found to have played fast & loose with his books, he must then repay the missing sum.
The VA makes our grunts pay back money the VA claims they overpaid them. Make the ossifers pay back money they wasted.
They turned the corner? More like went over a cliff. Don’t worry, this is all coming to an end.
Paging Elon Musk! Paging Elon Musk!
I’m (not) shocked:
“he DoD OIG was unable to determine whether the Air Force paid fair and reasonable prices for over 54% of spare parts worth more than $22 million because the Air Force did not maintain historical cost data, and the Defense Contract Management Agency Item Group was unable to obtain supplier quotes or identify commercially similar parts. As a result, the Air Force overpaid nearly $1 million for a dozen different types of spare parts on the contracts. One of the 12 spare parts included a lavatory soap dispenser where the Air Force paid more than 80 times the commercially available cost or a 7,943-% markup.”
Source: https://www.dodig.mil/In-the-Spotlight/Article/3948604/press-release-audit-of-c-17-spare-parts-pricing-report-no-dodig-2025-009/
Air force means aviation. Aviation parts cost tons more than commercially available parts because of the Aviation moniker. My son works on aircraft (Gulfstream) and they recently had a coffee maker and a fridge that went toes up. To buy the coffee maker from Gulfstream, since it has to be permanently mounted was north of $2500.00. Walmart? 80ish bucks. They bought the Walmart brand as it was an authorized replacement as long as it wasn’t a permanent repair (wink wink).
The fridge could be bought 1 of 3 ways. Repaired, refurbished or new. The repaired fridge was in the 40k range. Refurbished was around 60k. The brand new fridge, less door, was 90k. Why no door? No guarantee the new door would match the interior design/colors. The fridge is no bigger than a dorm size fridge.
But they are very nice planes.