The Department of Defense failed its first comprehensive audit a few weeks ago, following years of avoidance and delay.
A new report from The Nation says that the agency has good reason to avoid close inspection of its spending practices: it’s been cooking the books on an epic scale.
“For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions—knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports when deciding how much money to give the DoD the following year, according to government records and interviews with current and former DoD officials, congressional sources, and independent experts.”
