"(...) Finding Army General Fund Adjustments Not Adequately Documented or Supported
OASA(FM&C) and DFAS Indianapolis personnel did not adequately document or support adjustments made to AGF data during FY 2015 financial statement compilation. Specifically, OASA(FM&C) and DFAS Indianapolis personnel did not adequately support $2.8 trillion in JV adjustments for third quarter and $6.5 trillion in JV adjustments for yearend.(17)
This occurred because:
• OASA(FM&C) and DFAS Indianapolis personnel did not prioritize correcting the system deficiencies that caused errors resulting in JV adjustments; and • DFAS Indianapolis management did not provide sufficient guidance to ensure DFAS Indianapolis personnel adequately supported DDRS-B system-generated JV adjustments.
In addition, DFAS Indianapolis personnel did not document or support why DDRS-B removed at least(18) 16,513 of 1.3 million feeder file records during third quarter FY 2015. This occurred because DFAS Indianapolis personnel did not have detailed documentation describing the import process or have accurate or complete system reports.
As a result, the data used to prepare the FY 2015 AGF third quarter and yearend financial statements were unreliable and lacked an adequate audit trail. In addition, DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions. Until the Army and DFAS Indianapolis correct these control deficiencies, there is considerable risk that the AGF financial statements will be materially misstated and the Army will not achieve audit readiness by the congressionally mandated September 30, 2017, deadline. Further, without maintaining adequate documentation during financial statement compilation, the accuracy and completeness of the AGF financial data could not be confirmed, and some adjustments may go undetected. (...)
Notations: (17) Amounts are not cumulative and should not be added together. (18) DFAS personnel could not determine how many records were removed during the DDRS-B import process because two DDRS-B–generated reports that DFAS personnel used to review and analyze the import process were not accurate or complete." https://media.defense.gov/2016/Jul/26/2001714261/-1/-1/1/DODIG-2016-113.pdf page 4 of the document (not of the pdf-file)
The good thing about the following interrogation was that Rumsfeld himself detabooed the topic:
Cynthia McKinney takes on Donald Rumsfeld 2005
The insight of Rumsfelds failure is that the problem is far too big for just ONE person. It is systemic.
Criteria of judgement for the assessment of the bookkeeping practices within the Army by the professionals: "Journal vouchers are summary-level accounting adjustments made when balances between systems cannot be reconciled. Omen these journal vouchers are unsupported, meaning they lack supporting documentation to justify the adjustment or are not tied to specific accounting transactions. While many adjustments are valid, having too many journal vouchers may be an indicator of underlying problems, such as weak internal controls. For an auditor, journal vouchers are a red-flag for transactions not being captured, reported, or summarized correctly. Auditors must judge whether the errors that triggered the journal voucher are isolated or systemic, leading them to select more transactions to test. If the auditors cannot estimate the magnitude of the errors, they may not be able to complete the audit or issue an opinion on the financial statements. (...)" Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness FIAR_Plan_May_2015 https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/documents/fiar/FIAR_Plan_May_2015.pdf look there for the "Executive Summary" page ES-11 last paragraph.
Even there would be the necessity of keeping details of money spending secret there is not even a decyphering system for purposes of accountability of the spent money. That way the word "National Security" became a magic word to get more money.
"Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs.
'I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial activities,' he said in an interview. 'The complexity of this system defies description.'
The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. 'Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,' Vines said. 'We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe.' " http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Vines
Obviously, there is enough force to spend money but not enough power to control the money spending.
Vines is right when he is concentrating on the question of "safety". The core question is: What kind of "safety" is meant? For whom? For what?
You can spend a lot of money for "safety". It can produce safety on a single spot, on a single fragment of a whole structure. If you don't see the whole which has to be "safe" and if the "safety" of the whole is not improved then the better "safety" of the single spot or fragment of the targeted structure by an investment is a bad investment - bad spent money.
For example, if there is a political will to keep "freedom" as a part of the structure you wish to protect because it is an advantage for the whole system then the goal "freedom" has to be safe. If you take in account that such a goal is contradictive to "safety" in general you have to calculate the risk you are willing to take to keep up this kind of goal. And you have to assess if you are or not willing to pay the costs of such a goal.
It seems that there is obviously a lot of administrative confusion about the goals politcally wishful.
As one "accountable" official put it: " 'I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything' was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled 'Stop!' in frustration." http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/
As this "Super User" states himself: he possibly signed the ongoing Global Geoengineering Program because he could not take notes to inform himself independently of the usefulness of such a program. Maybe his few colleagues signed them - who knows. Nevertheless, it seems that there is and was so much to sign that there was not time to control their signatures each other.
A group of "Super Users" were and are giving a blanco cheque to unstudied projects with grave consequences. In Germany, we call that: immoral ("sittenwidrig"). This immorality - which is not used often in the judicial contexts - has as a consequence that an act in the law is not valid. Blanco cheques are rare non-binding acts in the law. That way you may sign a cheque but if you have not put an amount in it it is not legally binding.
It is very strange that administrative rules - of course, because of reasons of "safety" - expect that persons in charge of making decision for a public entity are not allowed to make notes about what they have seen in documents. This is very inhuman. And it is postdemocratic because judicial experts of the executive are deciding how much democratic control is permitted. It was the same with the negotiations about TTIP for the Members of the European Parliament and the single national parliaments. It is the same with treaties of the public entity of the Federal Republic of Germany (and probably within the U.S. either). Because of safety reasons you don't want to take any risk risking at the same time that the granting procedures are chiped away at nothing. As there is no real responsibility for the plausibility of the system the system itself looses forces and gets "unsafe" that way. But for this kind of "safety" it seems that there is no view.
Rumsfeld failed. Obama failed.
Who is a "Super User"? "In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work." http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/
And of course: a "super user" is a privileged person who is allowed to rule over almost unlimited resources which the U.S. President and the U.S. Congress have to take the responsibility for who again are giving the responsibility back to the U.S.-American people - in elections.
The U.S.-American system of checks and balances is working for the "Super Users" who are secret and don't have to be brought face to face with the constituent. It is not necessarily working for the constituents who don't get a hint if a measure is essential or not.
This is - of course - only human. If you have too much responsibility you lower your perception ability.
Dana Priest of the Washington Post states that Congress has only a very small staff to control the vast empire - with huge amounts of money expenditure - of the security state. In addition to it: the "Super Users" of the Executive branch are deciding what kind of information material the Congress gets. That way the Executive branch decides how much control the Legislative Branch is allowed to exercise. The Executive Branch decides the development of a story.
