The United States Army's finances are so jumbled it had to make trillions of dollars of improper accounting adjustments to create an illusion that its books are balanced.
The Defense Department's inspector general, in a June report, said the army made $2.8 trillion in wrongful adjustments to accounting entries in one quarter alone in 2015, and $6.5 trillion for the year. Yet the army lacked receipts and invoices to support those numbers — or simply made them up.
As a result, the army's financial statements for 2015 were "materially misstated," the report concluded. The "forced" adjustments rendered the statements useless because "DOD and army managers could not rely on the data in their accounting systems when making management and resource decisions."