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Paul Merrell

Reuters Investigates - UNACCOUNTABLE: The Pentagon's bad bookkeeping - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...pentagon

war & peace DOD financial-mismanagement

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • MILES OF AISLES: At the Defense Logistics Agency's giant storage facility outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, lack of reliable information on what's there makes it hard to throw out excess inventory. REUTERS/TIM SHAFFER
  • Part 2: For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollars
  • At the DFAS offices that handle accounting for the Army, Navy, Air Force and other defense agencies, fudging the accounts with false entries is standard operating procedure, Reuters has found. And plugging isn’t confined to DFAS (pronounced DEE-fass). Former military service officials say record-keeping at the operational level throughout the services is rife with made-up numbers to cover lost or missing information.
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  • Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts. Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s - a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies. And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,” Woodford says. “We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”
  • The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions” - in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s. Jeff Yokel, who spent 17 years in senior positions in DFAS’s Cleveland office before retiring in 2009, says supervisors were required to approve every “plug” - thousands a month. “If the amounts didn’t balance, Treasury would hit it back to you,” he says.
  • Paul Merrell on 19 Nov 13
     
    Nothing new here. Remember when Donald Rumsfeld announced the day before 9-11 that the Pentagon could not account for $2.3 trillion? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj1rT4bszWg It was the same way in Viet Nam. During my entire 27 months there, we could not be issued socks. We had to write home to ask family or friends to buy socks and send them to us. They could buy them at military surplus stores in the U.S., regulation Army field socks with cushion soles, but we couldn't get them from the Army. "An army travels on its feet," but no socks. Socks were not the only supply chain failures, of course. If you can't manage to get socks to your soldiers because they've been declared surplus, maybe you'd have problems accounting for expenditures too, ya' think? 
Gary Edwards

AEI - The Error at the Heart of the Dodd-Frank Act - 0 views

www.aei.org/101077

DFA Dodd-Frank-Act Banksters financial-collapse

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • The underlying assumption of the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) is that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by the disorderly bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers.
  • This is evident in the statements of officials and the principal elements of the act, which would tighten the regulation of large financial institutions to prevent their failing, and establish an "orderly resolution" system outside of bankruptcy if they do.
  • The financial crisis, however, was caused by the mortgage meltdown, a sudden and sharp decline in housing and mortgage values as a massive housing bubble collapsed in 2007. This scenario is known to scholars as a "common shock"—a sudden decline in the
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  • 27 million loans—were subprime or otherwise weak and risky loans.
  • The reason for this was the US government's housing policy, which—in the early 1990s—began to require that government agencies and others regulated or controlled by government reduce their mortgage underwriting standards so borrowers who had not previously had access to mortgage credit would be able to buy homes. The government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Federal Housing Administration, and banks and savings and loan associations (S&Ls) subject to the Community Reinvestment Act were all required to increase their acquisition of loans to homebuyers at or below the median income in their communities. Often, government policies required Fannie, Freddie, and the others to acquire loans to borrowers at or below 80 percent, and in some cases 60 percent, of median income.
  • Sometimes it is argued that the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) prevented more failures. That seems highly unlikely. The first funds were made available under TARP on October 28, 2008, about six weeks after the panic following Lehman's failure. By that time, any firm that had been mortally wounded by Lehman's collapse would have collapsed itself. Moreover, most of the TARP funds were quickly repaid by the largest institutions, and many of the smaller ones, only eight months later, in mid-June 2009. This is strong ¬evidence that the funds were not needed to cover losses coming from the Lehman bankruptcy. If there were such losses, they would still have been embedded in the balance sheets of those institutions. If the funds were needed at all—and many of the institutions took them reluctantly and under government pressure—it was to restore investor confidence that the recipients were not so badly affected by the common shock of the decline in housing and mortgage values that they could not fund orderly withdrawals, if necessary. However, even if we assume that TARP funds prevented the failure of some large financial institutions, it seems clear that the underlying cause of each firm's weakness was the decline in the value of its MBS holdings, and not any losses suffered as a result of Lehman's bankruptcy.
  • This analysis leads to the following conclusion. Without a common shock, the failure of a single Lehman-like firm is highly unlikely to cause a financial crisis. This conclusion is buttressed by the fact that in 1990 the securities firm Drexel Burnham Lambert—then, like Lehman, the fourth largest securities firm in the United States—was allowed to declare bankruptcy without any adverse consequences for the market in general. At the time, other financial institutions were generally healthy, and Drexel was not brought down by the failure of a widely held class of assets. On the other hand, in the presence of a common shock, the orderly resolution of one or a few Lehman-like financial institutions will not prevent a financial crisis precipitated by a severe common shock.
  • In effect, by giving the government the power to resolve any financial firm it believes to be failing, the act has added a whole new policy objective for the resolution of failing firms. Before Dodd-Frank, insolvency law embodied two basic policies—retain the going concern value of the firm and provide a mechanism by which creditors could realize on the assets of an insolvent firm that cannot be saved.
  • DFA will have important adverse effects on ¬insolvency law.
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Sep 11
     
    The underlying assumption of the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) is that the 2008 financial crisis was caused by the disorderly bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. This is evident in the statements of officials and the principal elements of the act, which would tighten the regulation of large financial institutions to prevent their failing, and establish an "orderly resolution" system outside of bankruptcy if they do. The financial crisis, however, was caused by the mortgage meltdown, a sudden and sharp decline in housing and mortgage values as a massive housing bubble collapsed in 2007. This scenario is known to scholars as a "common shock"-a sudden decline in the value of a widely held asset-which causes instability or insolvency among many financial institutions. In this light, the principal elements of Dodd-Frank turn out to be useless as a defense against a future crisis. Lehman's bankruptcy shows that in the absence of a common shock that weakens all or most financial institutions, the bankruptcy of one or a few firms would not cause a crisis; on the other hand, given a similarly severe common shock in the future, subjecting a few financial institutions to the act's orderly resolution process will not prevent a crisis. Apart from its likely ineffectiveness, moreover, the orderly resolution process in the act impairs the current insolvency system and will raise the cost of credit for all financial institutions. 
Paul Merrell

Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us? - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...f-our-money-without-telling-us

Army budget journal-vouchers

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” ~ Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, The US Constitution On July 26, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) issued a report “Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported”.  The report indicates that for fiscal year 2015 the Army failed to provide adequate support for $6.5 trillion in journal voucher adjustments.  According to the GAO's Comptroller General, "Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Often these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions…. For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly."
  • Given that the entire Army budget in fiscal year 2015 was $120 billion, unsupported adjustments were 54 times the level of spending authorized by Congress.  The July 2016 report indicates that unsupported adjustments are the result of the Defense Department's "failure to correct system deficiencies." The result, according to the report, is that data used to prepare the year-­end financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. The report indicates that just 170 transactions accounted for $2.1 trillion in year—end unsupported adjustments.  No information is given about these 170 transactions.  In addition many thousands of transactions with unsubstantiated adjustments  were, according to the report, removed by the Army. There is no explanation concerning why they were removed nor their magnitude. The July 2016 report states, "In addition, DFAS (Defense Finance and Accounting Service) Indianapolis personnel did not document or support why DDRS (The Defense Department Reporting System) removed at least 16,513 of 1.3 million feeder file records during the Third Quarter." An appendix to the July 2016 report shows $2 trillion in changes to the Army General Fund balance sheet due to unsupported adjustments. On the asset side, there is $794 billion increase in the Army's Fund Balance with the U.S. Treasury.  There is also an increase of $929 billion in the Army's Accounts Payable. This information raises additional major questions. First, what is the source of the additional $794 billion in the Army's Fund Balance? This adjustment represents more than six times appropriated spending.  Second, do these transfers represent a flow of funds to the Army beyond those authorized by Congress? Third, were these funds authorized and if so when and by whom? Fourth, what is the source of these funds? Finally, the $929 billion in Accounts Payable appears to represent an amount owed for items or services purchased on credit. What entities have received or will receive payment?
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