Did the Pentagon lose track of $21 trillion? This claim has been circulating since 2018, and according to most fact checking sources, it seems to be true.

The Nation examined “massive accounting fraud” committed by the Pentagon from 1998 to 2015. The analysis of the Pentagon’s “unsupported journal voucher adjustments” was done by Mark Skidmore, an economist at Michigan State University. “Unsupported journal voucher adjustments” refers to improperly documented accounting adjustments that are made when different financial ledgers do not match.

According to the Pentagon, these are budgetary moves that “lack supporting documentation … or are not tied to specific accounting transactions.”

One example given was from 2001 when then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld testified to Congress that “we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” For 2015, the Pentagon reported $6.5 trillion in “unsupported journal voucher adjustments,” The Washington Post reported.

But Skidmore said such questionable accounting practices shouldn’t take place at the Pentagon.

“The ongoing and repeated nature of the unsupported journal voucher adjustments coupled with the seemingly enormous size of the adjustments warrants the attention of both citizens and elected officials,” Skidmore wrote in a 2017 paper.

He added, “It should be feasible to track revenues flowing in and expenditures flowing out, and share this information in a format that can be understood by literate people.”

The Pentagon avoided federally mandated audits for 25 years, but that didn't stop the truth from coming out that there had been over $21 TRILLION of unaccounted-for financial adjustments over 17 years.

— Lee Camp [Redacted] (@LeeCamp) December 15, 2022

The $21 trillion is the total value of adjustments made to the Pentagon’s financial records over those years that could not be traced, The New York Times reported.

The Pentagon’s comptroller at the time, David Norquist, explained in testimony to Congress in January that the adjustments occur after money is spent because “we have systems that do not automatically pass data from one to the other.”

In total, that accounted for $2 trillion in adjustments — even though the actual dollar amounts potentially offset each other.

“I wouldn’t want the taxpayer to confuse that with not — with the loss of something like a trillion dollars. It’s not. That wouldn’t be accurate,” Norquist said. “But it’s an accounting problem that does need to be solved, because it can help hide other underlying issues.”

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