Our Money-for-Nothing Scandal

Whoops. Paul Bremer went and lost nine billion dollars while running Iraq.

Auditors were unable to verify that the Iraqi money was spent for its intended purpose. In one case, they raised the possibility that thousands of "ghost employees" were on an unnamed ministry's payroll.

"CPA staff identified at one ministry that although 8,206 guards were on the payroll, only 602 guards could be validated," the audit report states. "Consequently, there was no assurance funds were not provided for ghost employees."

Losing money is one thing. But this is a scam. It reminds me of Tony Soprano working out the allottment  of bribed construction awards with other "families:" so many no-show jobs, so many show-but-no-work jobs, etc.  Seven thousand phantom guards in one ministry?

So basically the US winked while Saddam profited hugely from surreptitious oil smuggling, then wasted the profits they seized after deposing him.  But it's OK--we've got 50, er 60, I mean 80, actually 100 billion more where that came from!

--TJ

Comments

[Zap]

So, when I did all that sniffing around to figure out how many "security contractors" were in Iraq making big money doing what are military does... I was chasing ghosts? They posted those numbers to justify expenditures that were... um not expenditures but embezzlement? I remember coming up with a minimum of 20,000 making about 150,000 for a year. The math isn't pretty.

Also the link mentions that it was just auditing Iraq's money. There was a similar story, early spring last year, where US reconstruction money was just impossible to audit. It was gone, but the audit trails were not in place.