Auditors Say Billions Likely Wasted in Iraq Work

If your member of congress was in office when all of this was going on and they are now complaining about the "deficit" ask them why they didn't complain back then. That's the problem with most voters. Paying attention to what they allowed to happen would prevent them from getting away with it today! They want to cut everything we need but had no problem with this? They want to allow firefighters and cops to have to take minimum wage while risking their lives instead of doing something to help? They want us to go without help getting health insurance to cover us when we get sick and have nothing to replace what they complain about? They allow massive layoffs of public workers at the same time they want to make sure the "job creators" keep tax welfare without them having to do anything for it? This is why I do not trust politicians on either side. One side is just as bad as the other.

Auditors Say Billions Likely Wasted in Iraq Work
Jul 14, 2012
Associated Press
by Robert Burns

WASHINGTON - After years of following the paper trail of $51 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars provided to rebuild a broken Iraq, the U.S. government can say with certainty that too much was wasted. But it can't say how much.

In what it called its final audit report, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Funds on Friday spelled out a range of accounting weaknesses that put "billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of waste and misappropriation" in the largest reconstruction project of its kind in U.S. history.

"The precise amount lost to fraud and waste can never be known," the report said.

The auditors found huge problems accounting for the huge sums, but one small example of failure stood out: A contractor got away with charging $80 for a pipe fitting that its competitor was selling for $1.41. Why? The company's billing documents were reviewed sloppily by U.S. contracting officers or were not reviewed at all.

With dry understatement, the inspector general said that while he couldn't pinpoint the amount wasted, it "could be substantial."

Asked why the exact amount squandered can never be determined, the inspector general's office referred The Associated Press to a report it did in February 2009 titled "Hard Lessons," in which it said the auditors - much like the reconstruction managers themselves - faced personnel shortages and other hazards.

"Given the vicissitudes of the reconstruction effort - which was dogged from the start by persistent violence, shifting goals, constantly changing contracting practices and undermined by a lack of unity of effort - a complete accounting of all reconstruction expenditures is impossible to achieve," the report concluded.
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