KBR Bills $5 Million For Mechanics Who Work 43 Minutes a Month

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http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/kbr-idle-hands-iraq-balad-contract-waste-pentagon-report-hearing


And as more GIs come home, the waste could get even worse.


It was just a single contract for a single job on a single base in Iraq. The Department of Defense agreed to pay the megacontractor KBR $5 million a year to repair tactical vehicles, from Humvees to big rigs, at Joint Base Balad, a large airfield and supply center north of Baghdad. Yet according to a new Pentagon report , what the military got was as many as 144 civilian mechanics, each doing as little as 43 minutes of work a month, with virtually no oversight. The report, issued March 3 by the DOD's inspector general, found that between late 2008 and mid-2009, KBR performed less than 7 percent of the work it was expected to do, but still got paid in full.

The $4.6 million blown on this particular contract is a relatively small loss considering that in 2009 alone, the government had a blanket deal worth $5 billion with KBR (formerly known as the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root). Just days before the Pentagon released the Balad report, KBR announced it had won a new $2.3 billion-plus, five-year Iraq contract. But the inspector general's modest investigation offers new insight into just how little KBR delivers and how toothless the Pentagon is to prevent contractor waste. Moreover, the government's own auditors predict that as the military draws down its forces in Iraq, KBR will keep most of its workforce intact, enabling it to collect $190 million or more in unnecessary expenses. Much of any "peace dividend" from the war's gradual end—potentially hundreds of billions of dollars—could wind up in the hands of contractors.

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The Balad report is likely to be a hot potato at the hearing. Commissioner Charles Tiefer tells Mother Jones the report is a "dynamite critique" of the firm's practices. "The numbers translate into an astonishingly large pool of KBR employees standing around idle and having the government be charged," he says.

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How did such a large bunch of thumb-twiddling mechanics go unnoticed? The Pentagon investigators found that the Army had no system in place to police how much work its contractors were actually doing. Plus, the unit in charge of KBR's operation at Balad reported that the contractor wouldn't reveal how many mechanics it employed there "because it believed the information was proprietary." The investigators (who eventually got the KBR data) note that as of last August, the number of KBR mechanics at Balad has since dropped to 75, but they conclude diplomatically that "opportunities for additional reductions of tactical vehicle field maintenance services at may exist, which may provide additional cost savings to DOD." In other words, the Army should consider sending even more contractors home.

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For now, however, it's hard to see what the commission or the federal government can do to derail the KBR gravy train. Bases across Iraq remain dependent on the firm's contractors, and that dependency is only likely to increase as more troops come home. "In essence…we basically said that KBR is too big to fail," Shays said last May. "So we are still going to fund them."
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too big to fail is just a slogan. congress could stop all this in a nanosecond if they wanted to.

war is a money maker.

[mike_c]

1. perpetual war for perpetual profits....

:puke:

[Rex]

2. We get lip service for our tax dollar and nothing more.

Responsible with money? Not our government.

[Fumesucker]

3. But they (Congress) don't want to stop it.

Follow the money, just like with the damn health care bill.

[Frustratedlady]

4. If they aren't fulfilling their contract, why are they still collecting dollars?

They could pay for the health care bill if they would go after the corruption.