Quick question? How come you gave to pay half of it back? On what grounds?

"Why do we have to explain a $880,000 missile that bombed a villiage full of brown people? Or a $72,000 drone made out of consumer parts but the company is owned by my cousin?"

it's worse than that, they don't know that they don't know. literally no one ever holds them to account, they've never been asked the question so why would they need the answer.

I remember reports of literal pallets of cash going missing during desert storm

It's an infestation of unconnected dots that could hide countless incidents of corruption. Were we to connect them all and compute the sum of adjustments, the discrepancy could be smaller or greater, exponentially.

The problem is our government favors the DoD like a prodigal son and is not eager to facilitate an audit that might reveal trillions in corruption. It already doesn't like the published records of trullions in bad investments while leaving our troopers with insufficient armor and a DVA that leaves IED victims to the streets and the elements.

So until I see otherwise, I'm going to assume that's trillions going to defense contractor lobbyist junkets and bribes.

That doesn't really matter though. The point still stands regardless of if it's explained by money literally disappearing into a hole or huge rounding errors and inefficiencies in their accounting systems.

They are still allowed much much more leniency with much larger amounts of money (aren't they aren't ever properly held to account for it) than regular people are allowed with comparatively tiny amounts of money.

A big part of it is reporting requirements, despite what some people think different portions of the government have different requirements. The reason a person gets inquiries about Venmo payments is because the IRS requires corporations to report that information to them and it's a mainly automated process.

Regulatory reporting requirements of Corporations to the IRS can't be copy pasted onto Pentagon spending reconciliation.

A better comparison, that is still not accurate, would be a cash business that has to report income to the IRS and has trouble getting granular details organized.

Complaints about transparency and accountability on the Pentagon budget are a valid complaint, but this is a poor example.

That’s a personal transaction and not business so you don’t have to claim it anyway.

Good, this is going to be so annoying. If I send my roommate $1000 to cover my portion of rent (which I used to do every month at my last place) it's not fucking "income" for them lol.