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

[Echo In Light]

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, 2010 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 Just days before the Pentagon released the Balad report, KBR announced it had won a new $2.3 billion-plus, five-year Iraq contract.

What the DOD investigators found in Balad was astounding. Army rules require that its civilian maintenance employees are actively working 85 to 90 percent of the time they are on the clock. Yet KBR’s own records showed that its workers were only engaged in labor an average of 6.6 percent of the time they were on duty. The DOD ran its own numbers, and its findings were even worse. In September 2008, for example, KBR had 144 maintenance employees at Balad, available to work 16,200 hours. Their actual “utilization rate” was a paltry 0.63 percent—which means that each of the 144 KBR employees averaged about 43 minutes of work for the entire month.

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.” Federal auditors are concerned with more than just KBR’s inflated contracts. In fiscal 2009 alone, the Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA)identified $20.4 billion in questionable billing, and another $12.1 billion in unsupported cost estimates, by contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2010/04/09/kbr-bills-5-million-for-mechanics-who-work-43-minutes-a-month/

[ixion]

1. It's okay, because Obama is in the WH now

so he's on top of it, doin' that changey thing. :sarcasm:

[Hippo_Tron]

14. This was my chief concern about keeping Gates on as Defense Secretary

Contractor waste, fraud, and negligence (soldiers dying from electrocution due to shoddy KBR construction) happened on his watch under the Bush administration. I realize the President has a lot on his plate and that he can't fix everything right away. But I hope this is something that Gates' successor gets to work on shortly after taking office.

[Hello_Kitty]

2. KBR seems to be the worst of the lot but for the most part military contractors are scumbags

They get fat contracts and then fob the work off onto the troops. Senior officers allow it to happen because they are more interested in getting promoted than looking after the welfare of their subordinates. Back in the 90s when I was in the Navy, I overheard a contractor say to another, "You can work the sailors 24 hours a day!" Which is exactly what they did to us. Sat on their fat asses collecting massive overtime while I and my shipmates did ALL the work.

[DJ13]

3. I think those mechanics worked on my car last year

[Rex]

4. KBR is too big to fail...

Cue rolling eyeballs. Didya ever notice how corporations are never punished for the murders they commit?

[Echo In Light]

5. Nation of laws...applicable only to the poor

[Wapsie B]

6. Good god KBR just put the mafia to shame with their billing practices.

I've wondered who lives off ill-gotten money such as this and still believes they are somehow deserving of it all?
To think there's been no monitoring system in place to see how much work is actually being done is astounding. And that's just with the Army. And I'm sure the other branches of the military are no different.

[Wapsie B]

7. Delete

dupe

[Bozita]

8. and in other news today, Cerberus is buying DynCorp

Saw it over in LBN.

[Echo In Light]

15. .

http://www.google.com/search?q=Cerberus+is+buying+DynCorp&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

[progressoid]

9. Woo Hoo!.. USA! USA! USA!

[Hubert Flottz]

10. There you go looking back...

[walldude]

11. A new 2.3 billion dollar 5 year contract?

I thought we were pulling all but 30,000 troops in August?

[Echo In Light]

12. .

[babyblonde]

13. CLAW IT BACK

thieves:evilfrown:

[Echo In Light]

16. .

[Hubert Flottz]

17. False Claims Act

Snip...

In the early days of the Civil War, the corruption extended all the way up to the secretary of war, a pinched, tweedy, white-thatched Pennsylvanian named Simon Cameron. Known behind his back as the "Winnebago Chief" for his alleged bilking of an Indian tribe before he came to Washington, Cameron enfranchised two cronies, New York governor Edwin Morgan and a former legislative aide named Alexander Cummings, to disburse millions of dollars on military contracts. Both Morgan and Cummings were involved in the carbine fraud, and the latter's excesses included $140,000 in public funds for the rental of a yacht and the squandering of another quarter million for such personal perks as linen pantaloons, herring, pickles, ale, and porter. Other Cameron cohorts were awarded contracts for a thousand cavalry horses at double the going rate. When the animals were delivered to Louisville, Kentucky, nearly half were found to be "blind, spavined ... and with every disease horseflesh is heir to."

Six months into the war, and in only the eighth month of his presidency, Abraham Lincoln criticized Cameron as "utterly ignorant and regardless of the course of things." That may have sounded harsh to some, but to others who knew the secretary of war to be equally as generous with himself as with his cronies, it seemed too kind. Cameron was hardly ignorant, for example, in repeatedly favoring two railroads in which he had direct financial interests, the North Central and the Pennsylvania, for the routing of Union war materials and troops. By January, Congress tired of the blatant abuses and voted to censure the errant secretary. But Lincoln, aware of Cameron's continuing political clout in strategically critical Pennsylvania, settled for kicking him out of the cabinet and into an ambassadorship. The disgraced Cameron left Washington in the middle of that winter for far-off frozen Russia.

Many of the congressmen who voted for Cameron's censure were themselves guilty of the same type of offense. Several, for example, made a regular practice of charging government suppliers a $50,000 "broker's fee" on every million dollars in contracts let within their sphere of influence. Edwin Stanton replaced Cameron in the cabinet, but the corruption and incompetence continued unabated. Gen. George McClellan, Union commander of the Army of the Potomac, held shoddy goods and services partly responsible for the failure of the campaign to capture Richmond in the spring of 1862. For one example, defective artillery shells frequently failed to detonate on impact or blew up prematurely in the cannons, killing Union troops. For another, the army's mobility was impaired by the low quality of thousands of cavalry and draft horses used in that campaign. "Worse than traitors in arms" was how a March 3, 1863 report from the House Committee on Government Contracts described "men who pretend loyalty to the flag, feast and fatten on the misfortunes of the nation, while patriot blood is crimsoning the plains ... and bodies of their countrymen are moldering in the dust."

There was no Justice Department in those days, and no effective national law enforcement agency. But not all the nation's leaders were crooks or plunderers, and as the predatory few continued to feast and fatten, the incensed majority searched for ways to purge this enemy from within their ranks. A Republican senator from Michigan, Jacob Howard, emerged as the leader of this effort. The ideal solution, Howard reasoned, would be legislation offering financial incentives to private citizens who took action against individuals and companies they knew were stealing from the government, a law that would make integrity almost as profitable as theft. More...

http://www.jcs-group.com/military/treason/claims.html