Linda Bilmes

That's right.

Well, I mean, it was difficult to try and get up to speed on understanding the

how the accounting is done within the Pentagon.

I mean, you have a obviously very large, complex organization which has a record of poor accounting.

It has flunked its audit every year since accounting was required for federal agencies and is the only federal agency that has done so.

Yeah, well, I mean, flunked its accounting in a sense

Up until about five years ago, it wasn't even able to submit its accounts for accounting.

No, no, no.

I mean, it's just that they have not been able to account for their assets.

I mean, they cannot account for at least 50% of their assets around the world.

The GAO, the Nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, ranks the lack of financial accountability at the Pentagon among its top risks of government every single year, for years and years and years.

And many people have tried to work on this, but they have made only modest progress.

And in fact, the day before 9-11, Donald Rumsfeld, the then Defense Secretary, gave a speech about how the Pentagon needed to get a grip on its accounting failures and how important it was to account for where taxpayer money went.

Our financial systems are decades old.

According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.

Then, of course, 9-11 happened, and here we are 25 years later, and we still don't have any kind of accountability for where taxpayer money is spent in the Department of Defense, or now Department of War.

I mean, I teach cost accounting.

I happen to believe that accounting for assets matters.

And if the Pentagon were a private sector organization, there would be extreme penalties for failing assets.

to be able to account for spending and where the spending goes.