ah, mephistophelis.: Links from The Duran's 'How $65,000 was stolen from each American'

Which is, by the way, an excellent piece. An excerpt:

Looking into this issue by using data published on the government’s own websites, he found that $21 trillion in unsupported adjustments have been reported by DOD and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for the years 1998-2015. That’s $65,000 for every person in America. Has Our Government Spent $21 Trillion Of Our Money Without Telling Us?
Jim Minnery of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service traveled the country in 2002 looking for records on $300 million. “We know it’s gone. But we don’t know what they spent it on,” he said. He says higher-ups covered up the problem by writing it off, and he was reassigned.
According to a 2013 Reuters report [“Special Report: The Pentagon’s doctored ledgers conceal epic waste”], the Pentagon is the only federal agency that has not complied with a 1996 law [actually a 1992 law that took effect in 1996] that requires annual audits of all government departments.
The Pentagon has spent tens of billions of dollars to upgrade to new, more efficient technology in order to become audit-ready. But many of these new systems have failed, either unable to perform all the jobs they were meant to do or scrapped altogether.
That Reuters article says:

“Linda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts. Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s – a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies. And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take ‘unsubstantiated change actions’ – in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called ‘plugs,’ to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s.”

This is also standard operating procedure for the other defense branches. Difficulties included a massive backlog of audits meant to ensure that vendor contracts had been fulfilled.
In a December interview on USAWatchdog (Dr. Mark Skidmore – $21 Trillion Missing from US Federal Budget), an online news outlet run by former CNN and ABC News correspondent Greg Hunter, Dr. Skidmore said he frequently consults for local governments, and undocumentable adjustments, while common, are never more than one percent of the budget. In the case of the Army in 2015, the adjustment was over 50 times their budget for that year.
Of the missing $21 trillion he discovered, $11.5 trillion was for the Army, usually on the expenditure side. But in the 2016 OIG report for 2015, he found a single transfer from the Treasury to the Army of $800 billion when their budget was only $122 billion. The additional $688 billion had not been appropriated by Congress, and the Army doesn’t know what it was spent on.