Dr. Skidmore has found questionable spending after FASAB 56 was implemented, and the figures are staggering when compared to official budgets:
Post-FASAB 56 findings:
For fiscal year 2019 alone (after FASAB 56’s implementation in 2018), the Department of Defense reported $35 trillion in accounting adjustments, which was 47 times the $738 billion in authorized DOD funding that year and 1.6 times the entire U.S. GDP of $21.4 trillion SolariMSUToday
Total post-2015 amounts:
A Bloomberg article revealed an additional $94.7 trillion in DOD accounting adjustments for the period following Skidmore’s original research MSUToday
. This figure dwarfs the original $21 trillion he documented from 1998-2015.
The scale comparison:
To put this in perspective: approximately half of the DOD’s $738 billion FY2019 budget went to easily verified expenses like military personnel salaries, meaning every dollar would have had to be counted 94 times to justify $35 trillion in accounting adjustments Boing Boing
Skidmore concluded that these figures are “so wildly outside anything that could be expected using fundamental accounting principles” that he had “nothing further to offer other than to note the absurdity” Boing Boing
Notably, while the original $21 trillion figure received considerable media attention, the $94.7 trillion revelation went largely unnoticed by mainstream outlets MSUToday
.
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