Who Needs Rules?

By BJ

Pretty much everyone should be well aware that Iraq War spending hasn�t exactly been a model of accounting discipline. Still, it�s nice to be reminded of the sheer scale of the incompetence.

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.

The audit also found a sometimes stunning lack of accountability in the way the United States military spent some $1.8 billion in seized or frozen Iraqi assets, which in the early phases of the conflict were often doled out in stacks or pallets of cash. The audit was released Thursday in tandem with a Congressional hearing on the payments.

This is apparently in addition to the nearly nine billion in cash the US flew in on pallets earlier during the conflict. And I love the examples they give at the end of the article.

Examples of the paperwork for some of those payments, displayed at the hearing, depict a system that became accustomed to making huge payments on the fly, with little oversight or attention to detail. In one instance, a United States Treasury check for $5,674,075.00 was written to pay a company called Al Kasid Specialized Vehicles Trading Company in Baghdad for items that a voucher does not even describe.

In another case, $6,268,320.07 went to the contractor Combat Support Associates with even less explanation. And a scrawl on another piece of paper says only that $8 million had been paid out as �Funds for the Benefit of the Iraqi People.�

But perhaps the masterpiece of elliptic paperwork is the document identified at the top as a �Public Voucher for Purchases and Services Other Than Personal.� It indicates that $320.8 million went for �Iraqi Salary Payment,� with no explanation of what the Iraqis were paid to do.

Whatever it was, the document suggests, each of those Iraqis was handsomely compensated. Under the �quantity� column is the number 1,000, presumably indicating the number of people who were to be paid � to the tune of $320,800 apiece � if the paperwork is to be trusted.

I can�t know for sure, of course, but I�m willing to bet that a fair number of those examples were passed around the office for people�s amusement at the sheer ridiculous incompetence they show with taxpayers� money.

This doesn�t necessarily mean that fraud was prevalent, but it does mean that any fraud that did take place will be almost impossible to track down and prove.

It also means that the Pentagon will be reluctant to prosecute any fraud it does track down, since such a serious lack of oversight makes the Pentagon itself at least partially culpable for any such actions. After all, under such circumstances, even a relatively honest person would be likely to take advantage of the system.

Controls, the saying goes, are there to keep honest people honest. Without them, nearly everyone strays, and the fact that oversight and spending controls have been allowed to lapse in just about every government function is one of the most pervasive legacies the Bush administration is going to leave the American people.