Iraq Reconstruction Audit Reveals Massive Fraud

A special multi-agency task force has been using complex data mining techniques to examine more than $50 billion that various military and civilian organizations have been spent, supposedly, to aid the reconstruct of war torn Iraq. The task force is about halfway done with its investigation, having sifted through about $28 billion already.

Through its investigation, the task force, Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, has already discovered schemes such as duplicate payments, cash payments to fictitious contractors, pay-to-play bribes and simple “pilfering of cash.” These have added up to hundreds of millions of dollars lost to wide scale corruption and theft.

This could be an extremely conservative estimate. An Iraqi official in 2008 told the Senate Democratic Policy Committee that some $13 billion worth of reconstruction funds have been lost to corruption. Auditors found that many projects that had already been paid for were simply not implemented and that, in Iraq, “nobody cares” about investigating these cases.

The task force’s leader, in an interview with the Washington Post last year, blamed the state of affairs on what he called an “ad hoc-racy” in which there was little governmental planning or supervision of funds. He noted that, when the occupation first started, funds were overseen by only a small number of individuals in the top levels of the coalition, which did not act as a deterrent for waste, fraud and abuse. He warned, too, that reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan currently carry the same lack of structural oversight and planning that has led so much money in Iraq to vanish into the night.