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Senator Bernie Sanders unveils Bill to force Pentagon to pass audit, citing “fraud” and “waste”

Sanders Unveils Bill to Force Pentagon to Pass Audit, Citing “Fraud” and “Waste”   BY Sharon Zhang, Truthout 21 May 21,

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has introduced a bipartisan bill that would require the Pentagon to pass audits beginning in fiscal year 2022 — or face fines. The Pentagon has never passed an audit.

The bill would impose a 1 percent fine on any military and Department of Defense agencies that fail to pass their audits. Sanders introduced the Audit the Pentagon Act of 2021 with Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Republican Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Mike Lee of Utah on Wednesday.

“The Pentagon and the military industrial complex have been plagued by a massive amount of waste, fraud, and financial mismanagement for decades. That is absolutely unacceptable,” Sanders said in a statement. The bill comes just after a Budget Committee hearing that Sanders held last week on the subject of the Pentagon’s budget “abuse.”

……… In 1990, Congress began requiring all government agencies to be audited by the Government Accountability Office. Since 2013, every other agency has been able to pass their audits — except, indeed, the Pentagon.

“The Defense Department remains the only federal agency in the United States that has been unable to pass an independent audit, despite the fact that the Pentagon consumes more than half of the nation’s discretionary budget and controls assets in excess of $3.1 trillion, or roughly 78 percent of the entire federal government,” reads the Sanders press release on the new bill.

The Defense Department was subject to its first ever agency-wide audit in 2018. It failed that audit, and the subsequent two audits it faced. Senator Grassley, at the time of the agency’s first audit, sharply criticized it for “26 years of hard-core foot-dragging [that] shows that internal resistance to auditing the books runs deep.”………….. https://truthout.org/articles/sanders-unveils-bill-to-force-pentagon-to-pass-audit-citing-fraud-and-waste/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=38e75c75-15fe-4ef5-9150-0ebccd5fbf3a

May 22, 2021 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, politics, USA, weapons and war