Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Your tax dollars at work
Well not actually yours as most of the money was borrowed, it is really your kids and grandkids who will be taxed to pay for this. The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has issued a report that gives some insight into where the $18+ Billion dollars appropriated for reconstruction actually went, and it's not pretty.
A federal oversight agency said today that the cost of things like housing employees, processing paperwork and providing security has consumed as much as 55 percent of the entire budget for some reconstruction projects in Iraq, vastly reducing the amount of money available for actual construction.In a private project, the money trail would be under close scrutiny by the owner to keep a handle on expenses, so why was our money treated so cavalierly? Perhaps the answer lies here:
In fact, according to a report by the agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, those administrative and overhead costs, as they are known, may be claiming an even larger share of the money — but the government does not keep proper track of how the $18.4 billion of American taxpayer-financed reconstruction money approved by Congress two years ago is being spent.
The highest overhead costs were found in the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts awarded to KBR, the Halliburton subsidiary formerly known as Kellogg, Brown and Root, for the reconstruction of oil facilities in Iraq.I guess it is true when they say that KBR is the best. We just didn't know what they were best at doing.
The report did not explain why KBR’s overhead costs under those contracts were more than 10 percentage points greater than any other contractor that was audited.
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