Only a few days after several watchdog organizations exposed the U.S. government’s expensive parties, dubious purchases, and bush league accounting techniques, further information has come to light that suggests the problem of government waste may be considerably worse than previously thought.
This week, Reuters released an article lambasting Department of Defense employees for allegedly falsifying their accounting records in order to balance their books for the Treasury.
Linda Woodford worked for the DoD, and she said that each month scores of numbers were missing. Her supervisors allegedly instructed her to take “unsubstantiated change actions” – essentially ordering her to enter false numbers to make everything add up.
Workers in other aspects of government said they, too, were required to insert thousands of “plugs” per month so as to not arouse the suspicion of the Treasury. “If the amounts didn’t balance, Treasury would hit it back to you,” he says.
The Army, Air Force, Navy and other government organizations agree that altering the numbers is “standard operating procedure,” and other officials say record-keeping within the government is chock-full of made-up numbers. The Pentagon is allegedly the worst offender. Multiple sources inside the government have said that the Pentagon has a chronic problem with losing data – the Pentagon cannot even keep track of how much money it has, how much it spends or how much is wasted, stolen or lost each year. The Pentagon has ignored laws requiring annual audits since 1996, meaning over $8.5 trillion given to that entity by taxpayers since 1996 is missing.
The Pentagon has also been accused of losing ammunition, weapons and other supplies. The Pentagon’s purchasing department has bought an outrageous amount of supplies that it doesn’t need or will never use. The cherry on top is that there are currently over $500 million in active, unaudited contracts with outside vendors, and the Pentagon has readily admitted that it regularly falls to long-undetected fraud and theft.
These shocking reports are rumored to be just the tip of the iceberg. It’s unknown exactly how much dirt government watchdog organizations can find and how much is too shrouded in secrecy, like in the name of “national security.” Do reports of government waste and complete ineptitude like these make you think that government-allowed retirement accounts could be negatively affected sometime down the road, or at the very least, you believe that your portfolio might need to be diversified in such a way that could insulate you from an administration non grata, call Janguard today at 800.571.6341 and secure your independence from government waste gone wild with a self-directed IRA.
