Independent Panel Probes Handling Of Gov’t Contracts

Travis Martinez – University of New Mexico/Talk Radio News Service

The independent, bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq acknowledged Monday that there has been difficulty judging how many contractors are in the two nations, a scenario Co-Chair Michael J. Thibault warned could expose the U.S. to fraud.

“Eight years after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and more than six years since the overthrow of the Baathist regime in Iraq, we still don’t know how many contract employees are in the region,” said Thibault during a hearing Monday. “The concern is not knowing exactly how many contractors there are, where they are, what they’re doing. That difficulty, in turn, permits and invites waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayers money and undermines the achievement of U.S. mission objectives.”

A major concern for the panel is the lack of a single census system to account for contractors in both theaters. The effectiveness of the two accounting systems utilized, SPOT and CENTCOM, has been in question. The panel raised concerns that during a one-month span earlier this year the two systems produced a nearly 80,000 count gap.

Three witnesses that testified, Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Gary Mostek, Deputy Director of CENTCOM Redding Hobby and John Hutton with the GAO, all expressed doubts that the SPOT program is an effective method of accounting. All three shared the feeling that a manual census at this point would be the most reliable means of keeping track of how many contractors are in the two countries.