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Greater transparency is needed to re-establish public trust. As we demonstrated in our last article, Comptroller of the DOD, David Norquist, clearly withheld critical information from Congressman Walter Jones, thus making his testimony deceptive.

At some level, we all must operate with some degree of underlying faith, but in this context there is reason to doubt. Without any supporting documentation, we are all left with having to decide whether or not we “trust” that government authorities are sharing accurate information. And yet the OIG has refused to provide any additional information, even with a FOIA request. We have consistently argued that in order to determine what these transactions were presumably for, one would need access to the underlying data. It is impossible to verify without greater transparency. Why would the Army make up such huge phony numbers, as Lindorff and his sources assert? And yet is difficult to imagine that such huge sums could flow in and/or out of the Army financial statement in a way that was unauthorized. More specifically, both Skidmore and Lindorff requested that the OIG provide more detailed information about the nature of 170 transactions that generated $2.1 trillion in undocumentable transactions (see page 6 of the OIG report). How could a $122 billion Army financial statement generate undocumentable adjustments that were 54 times authorized spending? Typically, undocumentable transactions are a just small fraction of authorized spending. For example, both Mark Skidmore and Dave Lindorff have repeatedly asked the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) to provide an addendum to a report published by the OIG in 2016, which indicated that the Army had $6.5 trillion in undocumentable transactions. Despite our efforts as well as those of Dave Lindorff, our government has not shared any underlying data or information regarding the nature of the undocumentable transactions.