And pretty soon you’re talking about real money.  If Pentagon overspending and misspending weren’t so good for so many people, Scot Paltrow’s piece in Conde Nast Portfolio would be ringing alarm bells all over the country.  Turns out that the Defense Department’s accounting system is so outdated, cobbled together, and unreliable that it’s not a system at all.  Tracking payments to contractors, military services or the many subdepartments within DoD is practically impossible.  In fact, as Paltrow writes, after a transaction — say, in the millions of dollars — is entered into Defense’s Indiana-based financial records system, "any ability to reliably trace it disappears."  The agency, together with Congress, has been working to fix this problem since the era of $640 toilet seats — in 1985.  Now the losses are in the trillions.  Read Paltrow here.  ЕH

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