The U.S. government’s drive to rebuild Iraq “put billions of American taxpayer dollars at risk of fraud, waste and abuse,” and the amount misspent will never be known, according to the final report by a U.S. watchdog agency.
The report by Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen, released today, questioned almost $636 million in costs through June. Auditors found such lapses as “inadequate reviews of contractors’ invoices,” a lack of sufficient oversight staff and poor recordkeeping, according to the report.
The U.S. provided more than $51 billion for reconstruction projects in war-torn Iraq from fiscal year 2003 to 2011.
The report said U.S. officials failed in “numerous instances” to thoroughly review contractors’ invoices before paying them. In one case involving a State Department contract, the department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs had one contracting officer validating invoices totaling more than $2.5 billion.
“As a result, invoices were not properly reviewed, and the $2.5 billion in U.S. funds were vulnerable to fraud and abuse,” the report found. The State Department instituted stronger oversight of the contract and recovered more than $60 million that should never have been paid, the report said.
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Not one penny of American money should have EVER been spent on rebuilding Iraq. They had enough to do it themselves. We should never have paid for one brick to rebuild that useless Mu SLIME hellhole. In fact, the only reason we had any business there should have been to kill the Taliban and al Qaeda. After which, we should have pulled out, and let them fix things on their own. We are not liked, and we are still hated to this day by these ungrateful, whining, useless dirtbags. Sand fleas, that is all I can say of them, unless as mu SLIMES, I call them what they are, Murder Incorporated. And the only good mu SLIME is a very dead one!!!!!!!!!!