US Army's bad accounting leads to trillions of dollars of improper adjustments

I'm no accountant, but, this does not seem so good. I doubt whether there are trillions of missing dollars ($62.4 billion according to the article); it seems like they have hired "not the best people". This is like something you would read about having happened in Russia or Turkey, not the US.

[rQUOTEr]U.S. Army fudged its accounts by trillions of dollars, auditor finds

The United States Army’s finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General, in a June report, said the Army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the Army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers or simply made them up.

As a result, the Army’s financial statements for 2015 were “materially misstated,” the report concluded. The “forced” adjustments rendered the statements useless because “DoD and Army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions.”

Disclosure of the Army’s manipulation of numbers is the latest example of the severe accounting problems plaguing the Defense Department for decades.

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