Spending Our Money

There is such a government agency as the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is an independent legislative commission established by Congress. Much of their work has involved identifying where we as taxpayers are getting cheated by contractors that we have hired to work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Recent testimony of Pratap Chatterjee of the Center for American Progress summarizes the situation. Fundamentally,it sucks; the basic problem is a lack of good date and, in many cases, a lack of any data. In more detail here are some excerpts from Chatterjee's testimony:

• In my remarks I will touch on the lack of inventory tracking of weapons and ammunition that were supplied by contractors, and the theft and misuse of the weapons by security forces. I will describe the weapons and security startups like AEY and USPI that defrauded us. And I will tell you about the unqualified translators we hired through L-3/Titan, the inexperienced police officers through DynCorp, and the payments that Third Country Nationals have to make to labor brokers to get jobs on bases.
• In one meeting my translator overheard the Afghan police officials discussing in Dari how to answer my question because they did not have proper systems to track the guns, let alone the ammunition. The biggest problem they faced was the fact that most police officers are illiterate—at least 70 percent by the most optimistic estimate I heard and as much as 95 percent—and are unable to fill out forms to track the weapons. The second problem was that some company officials shortchanged the Afghans—such as Efraim Diveroli of AEY, who was sentenced to jail in March for supplying 50-year-old ammunition.
• Nor are guns the only items that are traded; it was common knowledge that one could buy Afghan police officer uniforms and boots at the Kohan Froshi market in downtown Kabul.
• Back in 2006 I commissioned and edited a report that revealed that a company called United States Protection and Investigations, or USPI, was hiring local thugs to protect U.S. construction contractors in Afghanistan working for USAID, thereby supplying money and weapons to some of the worst elements of society. Since then, Del and Barbara Spier, co-owners of USPI, pleaded guilty to defrauding the government, billing for nonexistent expenses from fictitious companies, and inflating the number of Afghan guards on their payroll.
• But what this tells us is that when we, as taxpayers, demand that our money is spent well on hiring the best security, the best cook, or even the best janitor, the contract officers we pay to pick the best contractor have almost no role in determining who we get. The actual decision is made by a third party—a labor broker collecting the fees—who almost certainly does not show up on any government contract.
• What connects these disparate incidents—the security guards in Kabul, the Bangladeshi janitors in Kuwait, the Fijian truck drivers in Iraq, and the Arabic translators who cannot translate—is the fact that we do not know who we are hiring. We don’t know if they are qualified, we don’t know if they paid bribes to get their jobs, we don’t know what they do with their weapons, and we have no way to find out. If we did, maybe we could have prevented AEY and USPI from defrauding the government. We should have audited L-3. We should not be tolerating bribery by labor brokers.