Yesterday I blogged about the new logo for the USAs new Space Force, a logo that to my and many other peoples eyes looks all-too-suspiciously like the Starfleet logo from Star Trek. Well, I suspect todays article, shared by G.P., may have something to do with yesterdays story. And it may contain another hint of that hidden system of finance and its practices as well. The story concerns yet more trillions of dollars, in this case, $35,000,000,000,000 worth of accounting errors: Pentagon Racks Up $35 Trillion in Accounting Changes in One Year
The story is simple enough, and sadly, its a measure of how accustomed weve become to astronomical amounts of missing money, that at best it only raises an eyebrow. Yet, theres a detail in this article that caught my eye, and that fuels todays high octane speculation. It seems that once again the Pentagram has mislaid a few trillions and has had to make accounting adjustments:
The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone a total thats larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Departments continuing difficulty in balancing its books.
The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker whos pursued the accounting morass.
In other words, were already far afield of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfelds September 10, 2001 admission that the Pentagram had about $2.3 trillion it couldnt account for. But, says the article, you can breathe easy, because the money isnt really lost, its just all poor accounting:
The military services make adjustments, some automatic and some manual, on a monthly and quarterly basis, and those actions are consolidated by the Pentagons primary finance and accounting service and submitted to the Treasury.
There were 546,433 adjustments in fiscal 2017 and 562,568 in 2018, according to figures provided by Representative Jackie Speier, who asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate. The watchdog agency will release a report on the subject Wednesday after reviewing more than 200,000 fourth-quarter 2018 adjustments totaling $15 trillion.
Sloppy Record-Keeping
The combined errors, shorthand, and sloppy record-keeping by DoD accountants do add up to a number nearly 1.5 times the size of the U.S. economy, said Speier, a California Democrat. The report shows the Pentagon employs accounting adjustments like a contractor paints over mold. Their priority is making the situation look manageable, not solving the underlying problem, she said.
The GAO estimated based on a sample that at least 96% of 181,947 automatic adjustments made in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2018 didnt have adequate supporting documentation.
In laymans terms, this means that the DoD made adjustments to accounting records without having documentation to support the need or amount for the adjustment, said Dwrena Allen, spokeswoman for the Pentagons inspector general. The size and scope of unsupported adjustments is deeply concerning because it tells a story of poor internal controls and lack of financial data integrity.
But not so fast. Theres something that caught my eye and I hope that caught yours, and its this little detail:
Within that $30 trillion is a lot of double, triple, and quadruple counting of the same money as it got moved between accounts, said Todd Harrison, a Pentagon budget expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The Defense Department acknowledged that it failed its first-ever audit in 2018 and then again last year, when it reviewed $2.7 trillion in assets and $2.6 trillion in liabilities. While auditors found no evidence of fraud in the review of finances that Congress required, they flagged a laundry list of problems, including accounting adjustments.
Now, theres two ways to count money two, or three, or several times: one is to do so inadvertently and by mistake, which is what were being asked to believe here. But the other is to do it deliberately. In the banking world, where the same pile of assets are assigned to several different accounts all at the same time, its not only fraudulent, but there is actually a word for it: re-hypothecation.
Its that term, plus the admission that things are being counted more than once in these accounting adjustments, that bring me to todays high octane speculation: What if weve just been given another profound clue into the nature of the hidden system of finance? What if the practice of rehypothecation is not confined to the world of banking, but has in fact become a modus operandi of government agencies themselves, in this case, of the Department of Defense? In my original model of this hidden system, articulated in various books and at the first Secret Space Program conference in San Mateo, California in 2014, rehypothecation formed one of the techniques by which I speculated vast amounts of fraudulent liquidity could be created and kept from the public by a kind of double-bookkeeping. This, as I suspected then, was confined to banking and to the presence in the system of hidden and undisclosed bullion acting as a secret reserve on the ledgers. Since the reserve was secret, I reasoned that it could be rehypothecated over and over again, and generate the vast amounts of liquidity that a large secret research program would require.