The US Defense Department is unable to track how it spent tens of millions of dollars in the US "war on terrorism", Congress's top investigator said last night.
The department "doesn't have a system to be able to determine with any degree of reliability and specificity how we spent" tens of millions in war-related emergency funds set aside by Congress, Comptroller General David Walker told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee.
Mr Walker heads the Government Accountability Office, Congress's nonpartisan audit and investigative arm.
He disclosed the accounting gap as part of a broader indictment of Pentagon business practices. Congress approved $25 billion in extra defence spending for fiscal 2005, which ends on September 30th.
Lawmakers were moving to approve $81 billion more this week outside the normal budget process, including about $75 billion for war-related Defense Department operations.
Although there was no doubt that appropriated funds were spent, "trying to figure out what they were spent on is like pulling teeth," Mr Walker said, referring to an accounting effort he said was under way for Congress.
The Defense Department had no comment. Overall,
Mr Walker said the Defense Department, which is seeking $419.3 billion for its fiscal 2006 budget, was wasting billions of dollars a year because of ineffective management of its business operations.
Although Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top aides have shown a commitment to business management transformation, "little tangible evidence of actual improvement has been seen in DoD's business operations to date," he testified.
Mr Walker argued that the Defense Department needed to appoint a chief manager, who would in effect become the third-ranking official at the Pentagon after the defense secretary and the deputy defense secretary.