Pentagon Watchdog Misses Billion Dollar Audit

[unhappycamper]

Pentagon Watchdog Misses Billion Dollar Audit
CorpWatch / By Pratap Chatterjee

September 1, 2010 | Military auditors failed to complete an audit of the business systems of an Ohio-based contractor even though it had billed for $1 billion worth of work over the last four years, largely done in Afghanistan. Immediately after this fact came to light at a public hearing of the bi-partisan Commission on Wartime Contracting, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA) scrambled to dispatch an extra 10 staff to catch up on the job.

~snip~

DCAA has oversight over half a trillion dollars of taxpayer money every year. It is supposed to constitute the "first line of defense" against corruption when the Pentagon contracts anything from bunker-buster-bombs from Lockheed Martin, to rockets from Boeing, or when it subcontracts military support operations as it did when it paid Halliburton subsidiary, KBR, to hire Sri Lankans to clean toilets in Iraq.

Despite past success – including exposing Halliburton’s inability to account for billions of dollars early in the occupation of Iraq – DCAA management has drawn fire in the last two years for giving military contractors a clean bill of health and ignoring serious problems in corporate financial systems spotted by lower ranked staff.

~snip~

The first shot across DCAA's bow was fired by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress. In a July 2008 report that provoked alarm among politicians, the GAO gave DCAA a failing grade for not complying with government standards on 14 major audits.

"This auditing agency has been exposed as being fundamentally corrupt in the way they issue audits," Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, a former Missouri state auditor, told her fellow senators in Congress at the time.