Ladies and gentlemen, meet Stuart W. Bowen Jr., Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction. Soon, he will be out of his job.
Bowen and his staff have overseen the auditing of the $20 billion Iraq reconstruction fund. The Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has been responsible for monitoring the efficacy and legality of private contractors’ activities in Iraq. In the process it has uncovered a plethora of embarrassing instances of corruption and extreme inefficiencies in spending and operations. Its audits have saved taxpayers nearly $20 million in direct costs for the reconstruction effort in Iraq.
According to a statement Bowen made to the House Committee on Governmental Reform, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq has referred 25 criminal cases involving corruption in the government contracting process to the U.S. Department of Justice, four of which have resulted in convictions. It has drafted reports asserting that Halliburton, which has ties to Vice President Dick Cheney and is the largest civilian contractor in Iraq, along with its subsidiaries has consistently withheld accounting information from U.S. officials and has systematically worked to hide the specific nature of their actions.
The work of Bowen and his staff has essentially confirmed the suspicions of many Americans: The government contracting process for the reconstruction of Iraq is riddled with corruption, favoritism and poor management. Its findings were consistently damaging and embarrassing to the Bush administration, especially its 2005 report claiming that the Coalition Provincial Authority, the body that governed Iraq before the recent elections, was characterized by “severe inefficiencies and poor management.”
Instead of being thanked for a job well done, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq has been terminated as a result of a largely unnoticed clause inserted into a new military spending bill.
Ending the work of the Bowen and the Office of the Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction is a blatantly self-serving and a scandalous disservice to the American people. Without it in operation, taxpayers stand to lose large sums of money as a result of inefficient spending and will no longer have any sort of check into the dealings of the notoriously corrupt, government-tied corporations that consistently receive the bulk of reconstruction contracts. We recommend that one of the first actions taken by the newly elected Democratic legislative body should be to reinstate the work of the Office of the Special Inspector for Iraq Reconstruction. Without it, there is really no way of telling what is happening to our money.