Unaccountable: The high cost of the Pentagon’s bad bookkeeping.
Part 1: Number Crunch by by Scot J. Paltrow and Kelly Carr (July 2, 2013)
Part 2: Faking It. by Scot J. Paltrow (November 18, 2013)
Part 3: Broken Fixes by Scot J. Paltrow (December 23, 2013)
If you imagine NSA fraud as being out of control, you haven’t seen anything yet.
Stated bluntly, bad bookkeeping by the Pentagon has a negative impact on its troops, its ability to carry out its primary missions and is a sinkhole for taxpayer dollars.
If you make it to the end of Part 3, you will find:
- The Pentagon was required to be auditable by 1996 (with all other federal agencies). The current, largely fictional deadline is 2017.
- Since 1996, the Pentagon has spent an unaudited $8.5 trillion.
- The Pentagon may have as many as 5,000 separate accounting systems.
- Attempts to replace Pentagon accounting systems have been canceled after expenditures of $1 billion on more than one, as failures.
- There are no legal consequences for the Pentagon, the military services, their members or civilian contractors if the Pentagon fails to meet audit deadlines.
If external forces were degrading the effectiveness of the U.S. military to this degree, Congress would be hot to fix the problem.
Topic maps aren’t a complete answer to this problem but they could help with the lack of accountability for the problem. Every order originates with someone approving it. Topic maps could bind that order to a specific individual and track its course through whatever systems exist today.
A running total of unaudited funds would be kept for every individual who approved an order. If those funds cannot be audited within say 90 days of the end of the fiscal year, that a lien is placed against any and all benefits they have accrued to that point. And everyone higher than themselves in the chain of command. To give commanders “skin in the game.”
Tracking of responsibility and not the funds, with automatic consequences for failure, would provide incentives for the Pentagon to improve the morale of its troops, to improve its combat readiness and to be credible when asking the Congress and American pubic for additional funds for specific purposes.
Do you have similar problems at your enterprise?