KBR Bills $5 Million For Mechanics Who Work 43 Minutes a Month
March 29th, 2010Via: Mother Jones:
It was just a single contract for a single job on a single base in Iraq. The Department of Defense agreed to pay the megacontractor KBR $5 million a year to repair tactical vehicles, from Humvees to big rigs, at Joint Base Balad, a large airfield and supply center north of Baghdad. Yet according to a new Pentagon report [PDF], what the military got was as many as 144 civilian mechanics, each doing as little as 43 minutes of work a month, with virtually no oversight. The report, issued March 3 by the DOD’s inspector general, found that between late 2008 and mid-2009, KBR performed less than 7 percent of the work it was expected to do, but still got paid in full.
The $4.6 million blown on this particular contract is a relatively small loss considering that in 2009 alone, the government had a blanket deal worth $5 billion with KBR (formerly known as the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root). Just days before the Pentagon released the Balad report, KBR announced it had won a new $2.3 billion-plus, five-year Iraq contract. But the inspector general’s modest investigation offers new insight into just how little KBR delivers and how toothless the Pentagon is to prevent contractor waste.
Shoot, Arlene, come in here…I think I finally found out where som’dat money that Rumsfeld lost is. 5 mil here, 2 bil there, you know it’s gonna git up to 2 trillion eventually.
I couldn’t even read the whole article because I got so pissed off. KBR has been overcharging on government contracts since Bosnia. Remember all those plywood sheets that were like so outrageously priced?
Is Dick Cheney still a player here? If not, I don’t get the hands off approach to all of this FRAUD, WASTE, ABUSE!
And all of you snoopers reading my posts to this site, get your heads out of your ass, because you will lose your jobs before these KBR dicks unless you do so. KBR should have been been prosecuted about 10 years ago. They have no rights to government contracts! They are outright crooks and liars? What’s the holdup? What are your afraid of? A mechanical monster in the flesh of Dick Cheney? Get your heads out of your ass.
Stop this shit NOW!
The system is designed to PROTECT corporate thugs like KBR Eileen, not prosecute them.
Always has been. Always will be. Despite popular illusions to the contrary. Government entities designed to “protect the public” or “discover the truth” are ALL corrupt, rotten from within by virtue of their “bipartisan” nature.
Every few years some major scandal or another bubbles to the surface, where it is summarily shuffled off to hearings that solve exactly nothing while the prime perpetrators create fresh cover and carefully-selected scapegoats do their duty and take one for the home team.
The disgruntled ones end up on the outside with the rest of us. If they persist, things progress from suppression to vilification, until finally they receive the Dr. Kelley treatment. Speak up, go down. It’s an ancient formula.