Reuters Investigates - UNACCOUNTABLE: The Pentagon's bad bookkeeping

How the Pentagon’s payroll quagmire traps America’s soldiers

• Part 1: Hobbled by old, incompatible computer systems, the Defense Department’s payroll bureaucracy inflicts punishing errors on America’s warriors
• Pay errors in the military are widespread. And as Aiken and many other soldiers have found, once mistakes are detected, getting them corrected - or just explained - can test even the most persistent soldiers (see related story).
• "Too often, a soldier who has a problem with his or her pay can wait days, weeks or even months to get things sorted out," Democratic Senator Thomas Carper of Delaware, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote in an email. "This is simply unacceptable."

Behind the Pentagon’s doctored ledgers, a running tally of epic waste

• Part 2: For two decades, the U.S. military has been unable to submit to an audit, flouting federal law and concealing waste and fraud totaling billions of dollars
• In its annual report of department-wide finances for 2012, the Pentagon reported $9.22 billion in “reconciling amounts” to make its own numbers match the Treasury’s, up from $7.41 billion a year earlier. It said that $585.6 million of the 2012 figure was attributable to missing records. The remaining $8 billion-plus represented what Pentagon officials say are legitimate discrepancies. However, a source with knowledge of the Pentagon's accounting processes said that because the report and others like it aren’t audited, they may conceal large amounts of additional plugs and other accounting problems.
• The secretary of defense’s office and the heads of the military and DFAS have for years knowingly signed off on false entries. “I don't think they're lying and cheating and stealing necessarily, but it's not the right thing to do,” Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale said in an interview. “We've got to fix the processes so we don’t have to do that.”

Why the Pentagon’s many campaigns to clean up its accounts are failing

• Part 3: Time and again, programs to modernize Defense Department record-keeping have fallen prey to bureaucratic rivalry, resistance to change and a lack of consequences for failure.
• Piecemeal fixes that don’t address overarching dysfunction reduce even further the chances the Pentagon will be audit-ready by 2017. Worse, said Charlie Murphy, a longtime member of Senator Grassley’s staff, the Defense Department will have added billions of dollars in new technology that failed to deliver. “Supposedly,” Murphy said, “there’s a maestro that’s going to make them all play like a symphony.”