Pringle: Halliburton's Motto: "It's Cost Plus, Baby."

[marmar]

By Evelyn Pringle
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Monday 30 October 2006

Halliburton's contracts for work in Iraq are what's known as cost plus contracts, meaning that after all the costs for labor, materials and other expenses are added together, the company makes its profit based on a percentage of that total.

It certainly does not take a financial genius to figure out that under the terms of such a contract, a company has every motive in the world to increase the costs of every project to increase profits.

Since the minute Dick Cheney authorized the no-bid contracts for Halliburton, the granddaddy of war profiteering has been ripping off American tax payers left, right, and center through the use of these cost plus contracts, and another clear-cut profiteering scheme was recently revealed in testimony at a Senate Democratic Policy Committee hearing.

On September 18, 2006, Julie McBride, a former Halliburton employee with the company's Morale, Welfare & Recreation Department (MWR) in Iraq, testified that "the mantra at Halliburton camps goes, 'It's cost plus, baby.'"

Ms. McBride was hired as an MWR coordinator in Camp Fallujah at facilities that organize recreational activities for off-duty troops.

The two MWR facilities she coordinated were a fitness center and an Internet cafè. The fitness center had gym equipment, pool and ping pong tables, video games, and a large room for movies, fitness classes and dances, and the Internet cafè housed telephones, computers, and a library.

At Camp Fallujah, she testified, she became concerned about several Halliburton practices and especially with the procedures used to compile the head count for the MWR Department.

"Funding for the MWR Department," Ms. McBride stated, "was evidently based, in part, on the head count that Halliburton reported."

The complete article is at: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/103006G.shtml