To: i-node who wrote (664421 ) 7/28/2012 12:53:59 PM From: tejek 2 Recommendations Respond to Thanks Mr. Bush.Auditors say billions likely wasted in Iraq work during war 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.n 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. : 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. In that same report, the inspector general, Stuart Bowen , recalled what then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked when they met shortly after Bowen started in January 2004: "Why did you take this job? It's an impossible task." Defense Department , the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development.A key weakness found by Bowen's inspectors was inadequate reviewing of contractors' invoices. The report touched on a problem that cropped up in virtually every major aspect of the U.S. war effort in Iraq, namely, the consequences of fighting an insurgency that proved more resilient than the Pentagon had foreseen. That not only made reconstruction more difficult, dangerous and costly, but also left the U.S. military unprepared for the grind of multiple troop deployments, the tactics of an adaptable insurgency and the complexity of battlefield wounds. It also left the U.S. government short of the expertise it needed to monitor contractors. usatoday.com
