WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald J. Trump is planning to increase U.S. defence spending by $54 billion next year. But a series of recent reports by the Defense Department Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office say that Pentagon accounting systems will struggle to track how the money is spent.
The reports found that the Pentagon remains unable to accurately track its $591 billion annual budget and experiences billions of dollars in accounting gaps and errors each year despite two decades of reform efforts. Taken together, the reports show that many of the endemic accounting problems exposed in a 2013 Reuters investigative series remain in place.