DOD audit finds Iraq reconstruction contracts fail to meet anti-fraud guidelines

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DOD audit finds Iraq reconstruction contracts fail to meet anti-fraud guidelines

May 23, 2008 11:53:00 am

[JURIST] The US military has failed to ensure that over $8 billion dollars in Iraq reconstruction contracts awarded between 2001 and 2006 complied with federal anti-fraud laws, according to a report [PDF text] released Thursday by the Department of Defense Inspector General's Office [official website]. The same day, Deputy Inspector General for Auditing Mary Ugone testified [statement, PDF] before the House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform [official website] that inadequate record-keeping and poor oversight in dealing with military contractors made the possibility of fraud more likely:

Ineffective internal controls include such things as missing documentation, missing signatures from certifying officials, receiving officials, and payees; and missing voucher information. Ineffective internal controls could create an environment where duplicative payments, fraudulent activity, or improper use of funds takes place and is not identified and corrected in the normal course of business. A lack of internal controls can result in either no audit trail or in a complex audit trail, which hinders the search for supporting documents. Ineffective internal controls can result in missing or inadequate documentation. Also, ineffective internal controls can result in unreliable accounts payable and expense amounts reported on DOD financial statements.
We identified material internal control weaknesses related to out-of-country payments made in support of the Global War on Terror and for the Iraq Security Forces Fund as defined by DOD Instruction 5010.40, "Managers' Internal Control Program Procedures." The Army's internal controls did not ensure proper support for the commercial payments and that funds were used as intended. Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq did not have adequate procedures in place to provide reasonable assurance that equipment, construction, and services procured through the Iraq Security Forces Funds were provided to the Iraq Security Forces.

AP has more.

Fraud has been an on-going concern in US reliance on private contractors during reconstruction. In October 2007, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) [official website] said that the US State Department could not account for most of the $1.2 billion [JURIST report] that it had paid to a private contractor hired to train Iraqi police forces. In March 2007, SIGIR chief Stuart Bowen told the US Senate Judiciary Committee that investigators would apply stricter standards [JURIST report] when dealing with companies performing contract work in Iraq.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail

On April 16, 1963, an incarcerated Martin Luther King, Jr. (arrested for demonstrating in defiance of a court order) wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail in response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama.

Part of the letter read: We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. Read the full text of the Letter.