Eideard

Pentagon policy on issuing contracts for Iraq reconstruction

The U.S. Defense Department cannot account for about $2 billion it was given to cover Iraq-related expenses and is not providing Iraq with a complete list of U.S.-funded reconstruction projects, according to two new government audits…

The Iraqi government in 2004 gave the Department of Defense access to about $3 billion to pay bills for certain contracts, and the department can only show what happened to about a third of that, the inspector general says…

Although the Department of Defense had “internal processes and controls” to track payments, the “bulk of the records are missing,” the report says, adding that the department is searching for them. Other documents are missing as well, including monthly reports documenting expenses, the audit says.

“From July 2004 through December 2007, DoD should have provided 42 monthly reports. However, it can locate only the first four reports…”

Sounds like the Pentagon performed exactly up to the standards required by Bush and Cheney. Which means none at all.

Separately, the inspector general’s office sent a letter Sunday to the U.S. ambassador to Iraq complaining that the U.S. government is not providing Iraq with a complete list of reconstruction projects…

The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction was created in 2004 to continue oversight of Iraq reconstruction programs.

In some nations, civil servants and bureaucrats are part of an honorable profession. They exist and function on behalf of the best interests of the country.

The tradition in much of our local, state and federal bodies is to either have a safe, secure job offering a better life of retirement than private industry – or to have a safe, secure job offering an easy way to steal.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Sacked Olympus chief executive Michael Woodford says he has contacted the UK’s Serious Fraud Office about the Japanese firm’s accounting practices.

Mr Woodford, who was dismissed last week, told the BBC that he believed the camera-maker had paid out excessive sums in relation to takeover deals. He says he was fired for raising the issue, but Olympus says his different management style was to blame.

The SFO confirmed that Mr Woodford had contacted it.

Olympus said it would “consider” taking legal action against Mr Woodford for disclosing confidential information.

Mr Woodford said he had commissioned auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers to look into an alleged $687 million payment by Olympus to a Cayman Island company. He told the BBC that he was ousted after he distributed a copy of the PwC report on Wednesday night…

He says he was called into a board meeting on Friday at which the agenda had been changed. The only new item to discuss was his dismissal as chief executive with immediate effect, for which, he said, no reason was given.

After the board voted for his dismissal, he left the meeting and was followed to his office by a colleague…He was asked for the key to his flat, 51% of which he owned, and was told to get the bus to the airport as they had taken away his car…

According to Mr Woodford, auditors were unable to establish who owned the company in the Cayman Islands. He said questions still had to be answered: “To whom and for what did we pay this money..?”

A perfectly legitimate question within any legal corporate structure. Whether that structure is manipulated by officers dedicated to criminal pursuits is an entirely relevant question.

Sounds like Mr. Woodford asked that question. His dismissal is the only answer, so far.

They can bring back the Davy Crockett rocket -
One of the dumbest nuclear weapons ever made!

The Defense Department, considered by some a black hole of federal spending, is promising lawmakers it will open its books and show in detail how the billions are spent. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta…admitted Thursday that the Pentagon must improve its accountability.

“While the department’s systems do tell us where we are spending taxpayer funds, we do not yet have the details and controls necessary to pass an audit,” Panetta said in remarks prepared for his appearance before the House Armed Services Committee. “This is inexcusable and must change.”

Until now, the Pentagon has never been subjected to a so-called “clean audit,” a full examination of its spending. In the past, the Defense Department had pledged to provide Congress with auditable financial statements by 2017. Panetta shaved several years off that deadline to deliver that key part of how the Pentagon monitors its spending.

“I have directed the department to cut in half the time it will take to achieve audit readiness for the Statement of Budgetary Resources, so that in 2014 we will have the ability to conduct a full budget audit,” Panetta said. “We owe it to the taxpayers to be transparent and accountable for how we spend their dollars, and under this plan we will move closer to fulfilling that responsibility.”

The Statement of Budgetary Resources, according to the Pentagon, shows what funds the Defense Department received, what was obligated and what checks were written. It is just one of four parts of the internal accounting. The other three, including a consolidated balance sheet and a net cost for the entire department, will remain on the 2017 timetable.

Perish the thought that actual budget cuts have a chance to go beyond the smoke-and-mirrors cuts already agreed to between the White House, Congressional Republicans, Democrats with big military bases delivering welfare checks to their districts and the ever-popular military-industrial complex that has been sucking at at the teat of taxpayer dollars for decades.

Who needs a Cold War when you can have the War on Terror producing non-consumable goods forever and a day?

Must I teach Economics 101 to these twerps?
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Texas Governor Rick Perry has been on a Bernanke-bashing binge this week, demanding on Wednesday that the Federal Reserve “open their books up…”

But what books exactly does Perry want opened? The Federal Reserve already publishes its balance sheet online every Thursday for the entire world to see.

Not only that, it is audited regularly. Every year, an external accounting firm audits the financial statements of the Federal Reserve and all 12 of its regional banks. Last year, that firm was Deloitte and Touche, but PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG have also done it over the years.

Those financial statements are also posted online.

“Every aspect of the Fed’s financial dealings are wide open — wide open,” Bernanke remarked at the National Press Club in February. “There is no sense in which the Fed has secret financial dealings.”

Despite that public information, anti-Fed criticism seems to be the latest craze on the Republican campaign trail. On Tuesday, Rep. Michele Bachmann criticized the Federal Reserve for not being “subject to transparency.”

Those comments echo similar sentiments from Rep. Ron Paul, a renowned Fed critic in his own right, who over the years has repeatedly called for audits of the central bank and even a review of all the gold in Fort Knox…

“Now, what ‘audit the Fed’ means in the language that has been used by some members of Congress, is not about the financials of the Fed,” Bernanke said in February. “Rather, it’s about, quote, auditing monetary policy,” meaning Congress would evaluate the central bank’s decisions…

Congress already has some ability to examine the Fed through its own investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office…

What these fools want is exactly the opposite of what is well-reasoned law. They want the ability for Congress to set policy and procedures – day-by-day if they wish – for the central Federal Reserve Bank. Frankly, I think half the crap Congress manages is already scary enough.

Leave the appointees alone once they’ve gotten past the political crappola of Congressional confirmation to do their job. It falls within their area of expertise in the first place. Creeps like Paul or Perry or Bachmann – who can’t even get the definition of the word “audit” straight – are not the people we need establishing monetary policy.

Timothy Geithner and Elizabeth Warren
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

The independent panel that oversees the government’s financial bailout program concluded in a year-end review that, despite flaws and lingering problems, the program “can be credited with stopping an economic panic.”

The Congressional Oversight Panel, which issued the report, was created in October 2008 by the same law that established the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. The panel has often been critical of the Treasury Department’s management of the bailout operation, especially at its start in the Bush administration but also under the Obama administration.

In the latest monthly report released on Wednesday, the panel again criticized the Treasury Department under Secretary Timothy F. Geithner for “failure to articulate clear goals or to provide specific measures of success for the program” as it has morphed over time from rescuing financial institutions to propping up securitization markets, auto manufacturers and home mortgages in danger of default. The panel also described the program’s foreclosure mitigation efforts as inadequate.

Mr. Geithner announced Wednesday that the administration would extend the bailout program until Oct. 3, 2010. In a letter, Mr. Geithner told lawmakers that the extension was needed to assist families and stabilize financial markets.

Which is – after all – what the economic critics were asking for.

The assessment by the oversight panel coincides with the Obama administration’s expansion of TARP yet again, to extend credit to small businesses that cannot get loans from still-skittish banks. President Obama highlighted the new mandate in his economic speech, saying that the bailout program should now work for Main Street as well as Wall Street…

“Even so,” the panel concluded, “there is broad consensus that the TARP was an important part of a broader government strategy that stabilized the U.S. financial system by renewing the flow of credit and averting a more acute crisis.”

It added, “Although the government’s response to the crisis was at first haphazard and uncertain, it eventually proved decisive enough to stop the panic and restore market confidence.”

I would presume that after another couple decades of progress – if we provide the oversight erased by eight years of voodoo economics – we may have up to a dozen or so folks in Congress who have studied economics, Keynes, Leontiev, and make an effort to understand a taste of managing a market economy.

No doubt that will include no Republicans. The only part they “get” is subsidizing non-consumable goods, e.g., their pet military-industrial corporations.

A German bank employee who secretly transferred money from rich to poor clients has been given a 22-month suspended prison term.

The 62-year-old woman, dubbed the ‘Robin Hood Banker’, moved more than $11 million in 117 transfers…

The court in Bonn was told that the employee, who has not been named, took no money for herself.

The bank made a loss of more than $1.5 million when poor customers were unable to pay back unauthorised overdrafts…

The woman has begun reimbursing the bank for the losses, reportedly from a small retirement pension.

If her pension is anything like my Social Security check, she’ll be 247 years old by the time she finishes picking up the tab.

Daylife/Getty Images used by permission

The US Marines Corps ordered the first ever energy audit in a war zone today to try to reduce the enormous fuel costs of keeping troops on the ground in Afghanistan.

General James T Conway, the Marines Corps Commandant, said he wanted a team of energy experts in place in Afghanistan by the end of the month to find ways to cut back on the fuel bills for the 10,000 strong marine contingent.

US marines in Afghanistan run through some 800,000 gallons of fuel a day. That’s a higher burn rate than during an initial invasion, and reflects the logistical challenges of running counter-insurgency and other operations in the extreme weather conditions of Afghanistan.

“We need to understand where the fuel goes,” Conway told a Marines Corps energy summit today. “The largest growing demand on the battlefield today is for electricity and how we create that.”

He added: “We are going to more efficient. We have got to be.”

Conway’s announcement — and the summit itself, which is the first of its kind — were seen yesterday as a dramatic shift in the US military’s approach to energy consumption and climate change.

The Pentagon began to acknowledge America’s reliance on fossil fuels and climate change as a national security concern in 2002. A report from the Pentagon’s military advisory board last May called on military bases to work to lower their carbon footprint. A number of bases inside the US have begun to tap into renewable fuel sources including wind and solar energy.

But the Marine Corps are the first service to try to put those policies into action on the battlefield.

If you read my posts on a regular basis, you know I’m not surprised by the U.S. Marines beating everyone else to an advanced analysis, a new and useful practice.

It goes back to leadership in place back before World War 2 – and a tradition maintained through the postwar Civil Rights Movement – to the latest requirements of education either on the way in or before your butt is allowed back out into the general public.

As layoffs continue apace, a survey shows what many companies fear–exiting workers are taking a lot more with them than just their personal plants and paperweights.

Of about 950 people who said they had lost or left their jobs during the last 12 months, nearly 60 percent admitted to taking confidential company information with them, including customer contact lists and other data that could potentially end up in the hands of a competitor for the employee’s next job stint.

“I don’t think these people see themselves as being thieves or as stealing,” said Larry Ponemon, founder of the Ponemon Institute, which conducted the online survey last month. “They feel they have a right to the information because they created it or it is useful to them and not useful to the employer…”

The survey also found that many companies seem to be lax in protecting against data theft during layoffs. Eighty-two percent of the respondents said their employers did not perform an audit or review of documents before the employee headed out the door and 24 percent said they still had access to the corporate network after leaving the building.

Har! Confirms what most IT geeks already know. Most of what is labeled “hacking” in the press is someone using info that walked out the door.