The Big Scam

An audit performed by KMPG for the International Advisory and Monitoring Board, created by the United Nations to monitor the stewardship of Iraqi funds, has found that there was virtually no proper accounting for hundreds of millions of dollars in Iraq funds:

"US and Iraqi officials doled out hundreds of millions of dollars in oil proceeds and other moneys for Iraqi projects earlier this year, but there was little effort to monitor or justify the expenditures, according to an audit just released.

Files that could explain many of the payments were missing or non-existent, and contracting rules were ignored, according to auditors working for an agency created by the United Nations.

"We found one case where a payment ($US2.6 million) was authorised by the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) senior adviser to the Ministry of Oil," the report said. "We were unable to obtain an underlying contract" or even "evidence of services being rendered".

In a program to allow US military commanders to pay for small reconstruction projects, auditors questioned 128 projects totalling $US31.6 million. They could find no evidence of bidding for the projects or, alternatively, explanations of why they were awarded without competition.

In the CPA programs, "We found 37 cases where contracting files could not be located," the auditors said. The cost of the contracts: $US185 million. In another 52 cases, there was no record of the goods received for $US87.9 million in expenditures."