Finally! Contractor Abuse Investigation

The Associated Press is reporting that the Army has set in motion as many as fifty criminal probes into contractor abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070128/ap_on_go_ot/war_fraud

Senior contracting officials, government employees, residents of other countries and, in some cases, U.S. military personnel have been implicated in millions of dollars of fraud allegations ...

Battlefield contractors have been implicated in allegations of fraud and abuse since the war in Iraq began in spring 2003. A special inspector general office that focused solely on reconstruction spending in Iraq developed cases that led to four criminal convictions.

Imagine that! After four years of contractor fraud stories, anecdotal because the Republican-dominated Congress refused to hold hearings or establish a Truman-like Commission to detect and deter such abuses, the IG's office got four whole convictions. Wow, war profiteering criminals must be on the run now.

The Pentagon has viewed outsourcing a wide variety of military tasks as much more efficient, leaving troops trained in combat to the business of war.

But the Government Accountability Office reported in December that the military has been losing millions of dollars because it cannot monitor industry workers in far-flung locations.

The Defense Department's inability to manage contractors effectively has hurt military operations and unit morale and cost the Pentagon money, the GAO said.

Some 60,000 contractors have been supporting the Army in Southwest Asia, which includes Iraq. That compares with 9,200 contractors in the 1991 Persian
Gulf War.

Commanders are often unsure how many contractors use their bases and require food, housing and protection, according to the report. One Army official said the service estimates losing about $43 million each year on free meals provided to contractors who also get a food allowance.Bold added.

There's a WTF moment for you. Free meals to the tune of $43 million a year to people who are being paid a food allowance? Commanders don't know how many of these folks to plan for? And of course the number of contractors in this article is substantially smaller than has been reported in other sources.

In fact, the most recent figure is that some 100,000 contractors, enough to compete in number with the our military, are in place in Iraq. http://www.newsobserver.com/505/story/525092.html
This article deals with the great cost of covering the insurance required for every single contractor in Iraq.

U.S. taxpayers pay the premiums to insurance companies for these contractors. When the contractors are killed or injured in war, taxpayers pay the benefits, too ...

Bunny Greenhouse, a top contracting officer for the Army Corps of Engineers, said that insurance companies have charged exorbitant premiums, considering that it is taxpayers who are taking the risks.

"The insurance companies are getting over on us," Greenhouse said. "This has been accepted because no one looked into it."Bold added.

The cost of insurance for contractors on the battlefield is at record levels; 100,000 contractors are in Iraq now, far more than in the Persian Gulf war in 1991, when 9,200 private contractors were used. This unprecedented use of private contractors -- driven in part by the relatively small number of troops deployed to Iraq -- is a mounting, open-ended tab for taxpayers.

It is impossible to say how much the insurance costs. No agency regulates the premiums, and no one tracks the overall costs ...

The number of contractors covered by the insurance has grown more than sevenfold in the past five years and will continue to grow ...

In the first gulf war, seven contractors were killed. As of October, 646 U.S.-financed private contractors had been killed in Iraq. Most deaths stem from acts of war ... This allows the insurance companies to ask the U.S. Department of Labor to pay all future benefits and reimburse the insurers for all payments, plus 15 percent for processing the claims.

Sounds like there's room for more investigation. I keep waiting for Congress to start looking into these issues. It is apparent that the mere threat of Congressional oversight has suddenly jump-started the fraud investigations, but there is room for hundreds of probes into this mess.