Inspired by President Harry Truman’s World War II commission concerning wartime profiteering, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., spent the past three years researching contracting practices for the Iraq and Afghanistan warzones. Following two years of research, the commission’s latest report reveals rampant amounts of waste and fraud throughout the contracting system.
“Going to Iraq and looking at the contracting that was in place, I was stunned by the sloppy contracting practices, the waste and the fraud,” McCaskill said during a conference call. “It was a character that I had not anticipated in terms of how endemic it was.”
Upon returning from Iraq, McCaskill began working to form her own commission, aiming to investigate certain contracting processes abroad.
“We have to make the investment in government employees that know how to police this, and we frankly have dropped the ball in that regard,” McCaskill said. “I think that’s something we need to get everyone’s attention on.”
According to the commission’s report, by the end of 2011 the U.S. government will have spent $206 billion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The report also found between 10 to 20 percent of military contracts had wasteful spending, while 5 to 9 percent of contracts were committing fraud.
McCaskill worked with Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., to create the commission.
“As someone who spent five years in the Pentagon — one as a Marine and four as a defense executive — it was very clear to me that in the period when the overseas infrastructure and security programs were being put into place in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11 there was something clearly wrong,” Webb said in a press conference earlier this week.
Webb went on to point out both the good and the bad revealed in the report.
“There were good companies, as this Commission report has been careful to mention, who were doing a lot of good work,” he said. “But there were also a series of structural and leadership deficiencies in terms of many of these contracts that were being put into place.”
The committee was created in 2008 and was passed with strong bipartisan support from Congress.
“The Commissioners have come up with specific recommendations,” Webb said. “As a member of the United States Senate and one of the two cosponsors of this legislation, I can say today that their recommendations will be listened to and the energy they are bringing to this is greatly appreciated.”
The report made 15 recommendations aiming to overhaul government contractor’s involvement in warzones. Included in the recommendations was the commission’s hope to appoint an inspector general to oversee government contracting.
“As with all legislative proposals, we had to give on some areas that we believe in strongly, such as retroactive accountability for some of the abuses that had taken place,” Webb said. “We got an agreement that this would be bipartisan and that it would be energetic and it would come to us with the types of recommendations that would prevent these sorts of actions and abuses in the future.”
Earlier this week, McCaskill announced contractors wasted anywhere from $31 billion to $60 billion in government funds.
“The fact that we now have confirmation from an independent bipartisan commission that we’re not talking about $10,000 here, we’re talking about tens upon billions of dollars,” McCaskill said. “I think that ought to get the attention of the military leadership and the Defense Department leadership. With all due respect, they have not embraced contracting as a core competency in their leadership training.”
McCaskill said if changes were not put in place soon, taxpayer dollars would continue to be wasted for years to come.
“I intend to go at this as hard as I know how,” McCaskill said. “The Defense Department, the State Department, U.S.A. IP, they all need to have this kind of oversight so they realize particularly in this budget climate, we cannot waste this kind of money under the umbrella of contracting practices.”
