[IP] Your Tax $$$ at Work ! (excerpts)
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From: Gene Spafford <spaf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: January 25, 2006 10:07:20 AM EST
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Fwd: Your Tax $$$ at Work ! (excerpts)
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Audit Describes Misuse of Funds in Iraq Projects
By James Glanz
The New York Times
Wednesday 25 January 2006
A new audit of American financial practices in Iraq has
uncovered irregularities including millions of reconstruction dollars
stuffed casually into footlockers and filing cabinets, an American
soldier in the Philippines who gambled away cash belonging to Iraq,
and three Iraqis who plunged to their deaths in a rebuilt hospital
elevator that had been improperly certified as safe.
The audit, released yesterday by the office of the Special
Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, expands on its previous
findings of fraud, incompetence and confusion as the American
occupation poured money into training and rebuilding programs in 2003
and 2004. The audit uncovers problems in an area that includes half
the land mass in Iraq, with new findings in the southern and central
provinces of Anbar, Karbala, Najaf, Wasit, Babil, and Qadisiya. The
special inspector reports to the secretary of defense and the
secretary of state.
...One official kept $2 million in a bathroom safe, another more than
half a million dollars in an unlocked footlocker. One contractor
received more than $100,000 to completely refurbish an Olympic pool
but only polished the pumps; even so, local American officials
certified the work as completed. More than 2,000 contracts ranging
in value from a few thousand dollars to more than half a million,
some $88 million in all, were examined by agents from the inspector
general's office. The report says that in some cases the agents
found clear indications of potential fraud and that investigations
into those cases are continuing.
...The money, most from Iraqi oil proceeds and cash seized from
Saddam Hussein's government, also easily found its way out of the
compound and the country. In one case, an American soldier assigned
as an assistant to the Iraqi Olympic boxing team was given huge
amounts of cash for a trip to the Philippines, where the soldier
gambled away somewhere between $20,000 and $60,000 of the money.
Exactly how much has not been determined, the report says, because no
one kept track of how much money he received in the first place.
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