Millions stolen from Iraq rebuilding - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Millions stolen from Iraq rebuilding

A special task force is analyzing every transaction and person connected to Iraq reconstruction funding in order to hold people accountable for “hundreds of millions of dollars” lost to fraud, bribery and theft.

Stuart Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is part of a multiagency task force using automated data mining to sift through the $50 billion spent on reconstruction by military and civilian agencies. SIGIR is working with federal law enforcement agencies and the U.S. Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN.

“It’s a coordinated, concerted interagency forensic review that has been ongoing for over a year and is now yielding significant fruit,” Bowen said. “We will continue to implement the program until we have reviewed all of the money used for Iraq reconstruction and all of the personnel that had access to it.”

The task force is required to report its findings to Congress.

As of its January report, SIGIR has examined 73,000 records that represent $28 billion in reconstruction funds. It has identified $340 million in suspicious transactions involving 800 vendors. These include duplicate payments and payments to possibly fictitious contractors or vendors listed simply as “vendor” or “cash.”

SIGIR has launched 500 investigations since it opened shop in Iraq in 2004, resulting in 27 convictions and the court-ordered forfeiture of $69.5 million. Bowen said cases tend to involve contracting officers in Iraq and Kuwait who funneled contracts to specific businesses in return for kickbacks and bribes, or the simple pilfering of cash, mainly from the Commander’s Emergency Response Program, or CERP.

The guilty have been found to have smuggled cash home in their boots and mailed it home in boxes; they sold truckloads of stolen fuel in downtown Baghdad and took payola in the form of watches, cars and plane tickets.

“Kickbacks and contractor collusion characterize most of these criminal investigations,” Bowen said. “It’s contracting officers and paymasters and individuals who had control over large sums of money or access to it.”

Many of the cases stem from activity in 2003 to 2006. In the early days of the war, reconstruction funding oversight was granted to only a few people with limited power with the Coalition Provisional Authority, which Bowen said was “not a deterrent.”

Meanwhile, billions of dollars in American cash meant to fuel the interim Iraqi government received little scrutiny, Bowen said. “When you have uncontrolled money in an unstable environment, inevitably you’re going to see crimes committed.”

The ongoing inquiry has uncovered 52 new cases in the last year, Bowen said. What’s more, he said, the bulk of the agency’s criminal investigations are still to come.

Alongside the ongoing financial forensic investigative review, SIGIR has detailed three prosecuting attorneys to the fraud section of the criminal division at the Justice Department to handle SIGIR-generated cases full time, Bowen said.

“We know that we can only catch a fraction of the wrongdoing that occurred because of the difficulty of operating in a conflict zone,” he said. “We’ve done as well as we could under the circumstances, and we’re by no means finished. An almost doubling of our caseload reveals we have a lot of work to do.”

As SIGIR conducts its analyses, it is also soliciting tips from troops about wartime fraud, Bowen said, noting that the statute of limitations for such crimes does not expire for at least five years.