Millions stolen from Iraq rebuilding

Workers remove rubble from the remains of the Askariya mosque during its reconstruction effort in Samarra, Iraq. “When you have uncontrolled money in an unstable environment, inevitably you're going to see crimes committed,” said Stuart Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.


Millions stolen from Iraq rebuilding
By Joe Gould - Staff writer
Posted : Sunday Apr 18, 2010 11:13:54 EDT

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".