Investigators blast Arlington contracting

[unhappycamper]

A member of the honor guard at Arlington National Cemetery


Investigators blast Arlington contracting
By Mark Benjamin
Tuesday, Aug 3, 2010 17:04 ET

Army contracting officials have produced a scathing report on Arlington National Cemetery that documents the "questionable or improper" spending of millions of taxpayer dollars, supposedly used to pay contractors and purchase supplies at Arlington. The Army probe found little proof of services rendered for some contracts and payments.

Investigators mostly discovered a convoluted, incomplete and sometimes conspicuously absent paper trail to account for the money -- both at the cemetery and in the files of Army contracting officials who oversee the cemetery.

The Army launched this stand-alone financial investigation in June as the yearlong Arlington scandal exposed by Salon rapidly became more public. Salon reported that many at Arlington had tried to blow the whistle on questionable spending to computerize burial records, under the supervision of deputy superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, with contracts going to some of the same people more than once, even after they failed to produce a product. After spending somewhere between $5 million and $20 million, Salon reported, the cemetery's years-long effort to computerize its records wasn't completed.

Last week, Higginbotham invoked the 5th Amendment when he was asked about the contracts during a congressional hearing.

Army contracting specialists reviewed cemetery contracts and spending on everything from landscaping work to cellphone bills over the past five years. The resulting July 27 "Procurement Management Review of Arlington National Cemetery" report documents a dizzying blizzard of disappearing money, missing or incomplete contracting paperwork and fishy-looking spending on all sorts of things.

[Sherman A1]

1. One hopes there will be some prosecution of

those involved.

[pruple]

2. K&R

Thanks for this post. I hadn't seen it elsewhere.