Washington ? The Pentagon can’t keep track of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of weapons and emergency aid given to friendly countries, congressional investigators found.

The Defense Department agency that’s supposed to track the donations reported about $300 million worth of transfers since 1993, while records from the four military services showed close to $725 million worth, the General Accounting Office said in a report released Friday.

The Pentagon agreed it needed to create a record-keeping system for an accurate accounting of the donations to other countries, known as drawdowns.

Federal law allows a president to order the military or other federal agencies to give equipment, training or other support to friendly countries to deal with emergencies, fight narcotics trafficking or meet other needs. Drawdowns offer the president a quick way to help allies without getting congressional approval.

The Pentagon office created to keep track of drawdowns, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, uses a 1960s-era tracking system that isn’t consistently updated, the GAO report found.

For example, when President Clinton ordered 88 tanks transferred to Jordan in 1996, the DSCA reported to Congress that 50 tanks had been authorized. Although all 88 tanks were delivered, the DSCA’s tracking system only shows that five were delivered, the GAO report said.

In another example, the DSCA’s system reported that nothing was been delivered in a 1993 drawdown to Israel, while Army records showed that Apache and Black Hawk helicopters and services worth $272 million had been turned over, the report said.