quote:

According to Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, his reports have turned up all kinds of shady business in Iraq, ranging from mere sloppiness to outright criminal activity. Examples:
# A contracting officer was handed $6.75 million in cash and told it had to be spent within a week.
# An employee of the Coalition Provisional Authority kept the key to a safe with $140,000 in cash in an unattended backpack.
# The American authority lost track of $9 billion it gave to Iraqi ministries, which had no mechanisms for keeping records. Much of it, according to the Journal, appears to have been embezzled. One ministry, which employed about 600 guards, inflated its payroll to 8,206 guards so it could receive more money.
# An American soldier assisting an Iraqi boxing team at a competition gambled away half the $40,000 he was given for the team’s expenses.
# American contracting officers left the country with no record of what became of $1.5 million.
# One-third of the contracts signed in fiscal 2003 — worth $10 billion —were awarded without competition.
# One contractor charged $3.3 million for phantom employees.
# Halliburton Co. apparently lost one-third of the government-owned vehicles it was paid to manage.

Bowen also urged the government to withhold almost $90 million in payments to Halliburton because its cost-reporting was so weak that he could not perform a credible audit, according to the Journal.