Senator Says Halliburton's Auditors Saw Problems

[kskiska]

Internal auditors at the Halliburton Co. subsidiary importing fuel into Iraq warned the company that it was overcharging the government even before a Defense Department draft audit raised similar concerns, Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) charged yesterday.

Lieberman, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said members of his staff learned about the internal audit during a briefing Wednesday with the head of the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA), which announced last week that Halliburton may have overcharged the government $61 million to import fuel from Kuwait instead of Turkey.

In a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Lieberman, the ranking member of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said auditors working for the subsidiary, KBR, "warned that the prices the company was charging to import fuel from Kuwait into Iraq were excessive and that the company's prices and contracting procedures were in violation of" federal procurement rules.

"This extraordinary internal audit suggests that Halliburton had been previously warned by its own auditors that it was overcharging for the fuel but apparently ignored these important warnings and continued to charge the federal government inflated prices," he wrote.

more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13397-2003Dec18.html

[Cush]

1. Page E04?

should be on the front page, but I guess its that liberal media bias

[kainah]

2. They needed the front pages, I guess

to publish their correction of the misinterpretation of Tom Kean's remarks that 9/11 should have been prevented, even though they never published his remark that 9/11 should have been prevented.

Priorities, you know.............

This sounds like another good way of Joe trying to pump up his visibility. I'm kind of surprised the Post didn't give him better play since it appears the press is leaning heavily toward him since the Saddam capture.

[NervousRex]

3. Lieberman is angry....

because, Halliburton built the Death Star with that pesky exhaust-port vulnerability.