'we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence...by the militaryindustrial complex'

[marmar]

from the Center for Public Integrity, via truthout:



The Pentagon has been paying hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year to people and companies that don’t deserve it, but its financial management shortcomings are so severe that it’s made little progress in halting the errors or even measuring their magnitude, according to a report released by a Senate committee Thursday.

Although the Defense Department reported making over $1.1 billion in overpayments in fiscal year 2011 to military personnel and retirees, civilian defense workers, contractors, and others, investigators from the Government Accountability Office said that figure is not credible due to missing invoices and other flawed paperwork, as well as errors in arithmetic.

The Pentagon is required by law to ferret out programs susceptible to significant payment errors and then use statistical sampling to estimate the size of those errors, so that Congress can determine the size of the problem. But GAO found defense finance officials didn't have procedures in place to collect and maintain the data they need to come up with a credible estimate.

Even when the department could find and document mistaken payments, it frequently did not take cost-effective steps to recover the money, the GAO said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for example, has spent $256,000 since 2009 on an automated overpayment-detection program that has recovered just one improper payment of $20.79, GAO said. .......................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/news/item/16850-pentagon-may-be-wasting-a-billion-dollars-a-year-in-erroneous-payments-to-contractors

[sibelian]

1. Useless bastards.

Paid to fuck up.

[woo me with science]

2. Slaughter, devastation, impoverishment, and despair for profit.

The depth of the evil is unfathomable.