In 2001, Donald Rumsfeld said ‘According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.‘ This has been misinterpreted by many people as $2.3 trillion actually going missing. However, it’s really just about the way the money was accounted for.
Rumsfeld is asking for more money to improve the accounting systems because the DOD is working with very outdated systems. This means transactions can’t be tracked to acceptable accounting standards. As an example he says:
