I feel like I'm going to be fighting the fight to dispel this idiotic headline for the rest of my life. You posted a link to subscriber-only content that isn't currently searchable on archive.is, but I'm going to guess it's the thing about inter-LOA transfers not being fully auditable within GFEBS.

I was in the 1st CAV Comptroller's office as a budget officer when this headline first started circulating. It was during the initial GFEBS onboarding, and the push to produce GAAP-compliant auditable financial statements was coming out for the first time in the DoD. You have to understand what that entails. Historically, before GFEBS existed, all purchases and funds transfers were recorded in one of many distinct information systems that were independently procured and not interoperable. Many of those were just "receipts in a filing cabinet somewhere."

The effort to get records from all of these disparate legacy systems into GFEBS, which is the government's custom version of an SAP ERP procured from Oracle, involved manual export of records into a human readable form, then that human typing them into GFEBS. For paper records, it involved digging into filing cabinets and doing the same thing, manually transcribing records into GFEBS. We were asked to do all of this in the same year the sequester happened, which involved having the entire civilian budget office staff furloughed. That meant soldiers had to do it. Except those soldiers also had to do stuff like train to be soldiers and deploy to Afghanistan.

So yeah, we didn't meet the deadline. I'm very sorry that the three-person staff I had couldn't find and transcribe every record from a universe of legacy systems that largely may not even be accessible without special hardware, plus filing cabinets in the attic of the division headquarters, while also being asked to do their normal job, too.

It's not that the records don't exist. It's not that no one actually knows where that money went. It's that transcribing into the current system of record involves probably millions of labor hours that Congress doesn't want to fund, but wants us to do anyway. Rumsfeld isn't wrong here. It's inefficient and stupid and shameful that we have this universe of legacy record-keeping systems that don't use any kind of standard format and don't interoperate with each other digitally. But fixing that involves more than just paying Oracle a bunch of money to produce one ERP to rule them all. The existing records still need to be transcribed, and there is no way to get around the human labor that requires.

But it's quite a far cry from "receipts and approval records for transactions only exist in a complex web of outdated information systems that don't interoperate and require manual human labor to transcribe between" to saying $X trillion "disappeared." The money wasn't lost.

Here you go: https://archive.ph/Pt2Ef.

Clearly you know more than me about this so I think I'll let you read it and you tell me if anything changes. Then I'll see about reading the rest of your comment.

so suppose there was some impropriety in the fund movement, who would be able to audit this?

on the blockchain, it's anyone who knows how to use a block explorer.