Imagine how many homeless we could feed, or how many children we could REALLY educate with kick assed educations, for this.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are missing in action in Afghanistan, and auditors are blaming the Pentagon’s flawed accounting practices for the problem.

A new report from the office of John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), revealed that there’s virtually no way to know what happened to a large chunk of money the Defense Department spent in Afghanistan before 2010.

Related: $100 Billion in Aid Squandered in Afghanistan

The auditors said DOD handed over data only for $21 billion of the total $66 billion it spent rebuilding the war-torn country. But unlike most cases of missing money in Afghanistan (of which there are plenty), the auditors don’t blame this on corruption or waste—but rather on accounting issues.

The Commander’s Emergency Response Program, for example, is set up in such a way that it’s extremely difficult to monitor all of the money spent on the program’s projects. Under that program, commanders may spend money to respond to emergencies like floods and fires. Any expense below $500,000 isn’t treated as a traditional defense contract and doesn’t have to be recorded in the same way.

The Pentagon only had data for about 57 percent of the total $795 million spent by that program between the years 2002 and 2013.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/2015/04/01/45-Billion-Tax-Dollars-Goes-Missing-Afghanistan