It was physically impossible for them to find any fraud because there was virtually no accounting data to review except for the numbers they admitted they just pulled out of thin air. But given the military’s tradition and record, the odds are there’s relatively little pocket-lining personal fraud – that all occurs with the corporate contractors – but there is undoubtedly a vast amount of waste and administrative abuse of funds, because lack of accounting procedure has to be linked to that kind of misfeasance.
Medicare For All
No More Premiums. No More Co-Pays. No More Deductibles. No More Networks.
Your Health. Simplified.
The various auditors reached exactly zero official conclusions because they determined an audit couldn’t be completed, due to the rampant fraud and errors.
Just FYI, Switzerland doesn’t have a public health care system. It’s all based on private health insurance (about 5k/year). Some key points:
- It’s compulsory (if you move to the country and don’t sign up for the health insurance within three months, the authorities will automatically sign you up with a randomly chosen provider).
- There’s maybe a dozen providers.
- The a basic health insurance has a level of coverage that’s strictly regulated. This makes it fairly easy to compare different options, since there’s just a couple of degrees of freedom (+ differences in price).
(Also, it’s the second most expensive health care system in the world. But it’s still cheaper than the US, so you’re correct that you could certainly afford it).
So you’ve accused them of fraud twice now.
Can you please provide a specific example of fraud that was uncovered? Because I’m pretty sure that they actually found zero instances of fraud.
But please point out the specific cases of fraud you are talking about. Like, an actual example from the audit, not just someone in the internet saying that they had fraud.
Further, your statement that they reached zero official conclusions is not actually correct either. They found numerous problems, which they expected, and are moving to address them already. Also, various portions of the military, like the army corps of engineers, were successfully audited and received a clean opinion from the auditors.
Note that you can’t find examples of fraud in an audit that wasn’t able to be completed. For public businesses, they would have had to file a Disclaimer of Opinion stating they weren’t able to complete the audit.
Look, you believe the DoD is clean as a whistle, no fraud, everything is totally on board. I don’t. Life goes on.
They actually did this, for various individual parts of the military. Many parts received clean opinions, many received opinions with various problems that were found (which is what is serving the basis for the changes the DOD has announced), and in some of those opinions they noted that they lacked documentation to perform a full evaluation.
But as far as i am aware, there were literally zero cases of actual fraud uncovered.
…,which makes it hard to pass laws that effectively tax them, sure, but that’s not a reason not to try to pass those laws. Tax capital gains at the same rates as income, for example.
Not if they’re US citizens; then their income anywhere in the world is subject to US income taxes.
Lots of countries tax the wealthy at much higher rates than we do. No reason we can’t join them.
This is true enough. If I had to characterize the audit results, I’d say the auditors found that, generally, the DOD’s controls were so poor that it was effectively impossible to determine if fraud had occurred.
Agreed. My main takeaway, when combined with the previous report that uncovered the scale of waste at the Pentagon that was buried, is that the DoD has engaged in a program of deliberate obfuscation, misdirection, unauthorized and illegitimate use of funds, and is making any attempt at improving the fiscal standing and efficiency impossible.
That, if they are not engaged in fraud, they are engaged in behavior that is indistinguishable from fraud in the way they are using plugs as a shell game to hid the true spending and allocation. That until their financial house is in order any cries about lack of funding for a specific program, capability, or personal are spurious at best, and outright deceptions most likely. That the contractors they work with are complicit in a culture of unaccountable spending and mission creep. That if this were literally any other department engaged in a fraction of the financial negligence that the DoD has, the GOP would be demanding it be closed completely. That if you were to look at the purest example of Washington waste, graft, and inefficiency, the DoD would be the prime example.
I would wager there is as much waste in the DoD as there is in every single other non medical and healthcare related department combined.
Well that’s a neat trick, claiming there’s no fraud because accounting and responsibilities are so screwed up you can’t account for much and therefore even prove fraud. The budget is huge.
It’s a ridiculous position to think there is zero fraud. The question is whether or not it’s extraordinary high, not if it exists.
It would be, but I don’t claim there is no fraud, and I don’t find the DOD’s absence of controls exculpatory. If an audit of any public company produced that result, it would probably destroy the company, and almost certainly destroy the executive team. I’m just saying that claiming the audit found no evidence of fraud is a bizarre way of characterizing the result.
That wasn’t directed at you. That was a general statement, thus the new line/new sentence. Finding zero from the effort, that doesn’t pass the smell test,is another way of putting it… zero…
Merely in response to the unsubstantiated claim that there was tons of fraud. There’s was no finding of fraud at all, and the audit, despite issues with documentation, still dug into an immense amount within the DoD. It was not a superficial examination that just gave up, as some have suggested. Again, numerous groups within the overall DoD completed their audits entirely, with no findings… Including no findings about failures in record keeping. Those groups passed their audits.
Certainly, given the sheer size of the US DoD, I feel like there must be some sort of fraud… But without actual evidence, it’s wrong to say that it’s rife with fraud, as some have suggested. There was no evidence of that.
Medicare has a 20% coninsurance and $183 annual deductible this year.
I get what you’re saying, but I think that if e.g. the IRS came to examine my books and found that, in effect, I kept no books at all, I don’t imagine that a sensible response would be well there’s no evidence of fraud here. I think, instead, the burden might be on me to explain an awful lot, and prove it to boot. So it can be true that the audit found no fraud, for the very bad reason that the DOD operates in such a way as to permit and enable fraud while making it impossible to detect. That’s…bad.
There are a lot of people who don’t understand Medicare at all but support some fantasy idea of it.
Invisible fraud is not fraud. /s
My wife will qualify for medicare and has set it up to begin next February. She will be adding one additional bit of coverage then (B) and will add the other (D or F?) when she quits working in the summer. We have been inundated with phone calls from who know who for the last couple months with people trying to sell supplements, but she is going with our current insurer.