It appears that qui tam and whistleblower cases in the Department of Defense area are bound to take off.
The DOD Inspector General has issued a report on what it calls “challenges” to keeping up with the supplies for our troops and for distribution in Iraq.
http://www.dodig.mil/Audit/reports/fy08/08-026.pdf
The IG said it had “identified a large amount of equipment that was unaccounted for,” but that “it would not be feasible or prudent to request MNSTC-I to continue to try to account for that equipment.” But it’s the specifics that tell the tale – like the fact that they couldn’t account for 12,712 of 13,508 weapons that were supposed to be delivered. And like this terrifying sentence: “We were unable to identify an audit trail for 99 percent of equipment MIPRs, worth $438.2 million.”
Yikes! You like to think that it was just a matter of poor procedure controls – that none of these weapons walked off into enemy hands, and that none of the suppliers took advantage of the confusion to ship just part of what they had promised.
But how can you know? And that’s the point of the report.
In her blog, Dina Rasor reminds us of the fraud that came to light in the 1980’s. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dina-rasor/outraged-at-the-billion-d_b_75707.html
Good point. Who could forget the $600 toilet seats?
As an interesting aside, I tried to find out just how much those toilet seats did cost. I gather that the story has moved into the halls of urban myth by now, because folks cite prices from $600 to $40,000. Either way, it’s more than I pay at Home Depot.
But back to the question – who could forget the toilet seats? We could, that’s who.
Let’s hope there are some folks out there who will blow the whistle if fraud did occur. I personally don’t want to pay my tax share of $438.2 million.
