Far too many and who really cares?
A United Arab Emirates-based logistics contractor billed Defense Department authorities in Iraq for parts at prices marked up as high as 5,000 percent and 12,000 percent, according to a quarterly report released Saturday by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.
A review of a $119 million reconstruction and logistics contract with Anham LLC questioned almost 40 percent of its costs, including:
- $900 for a control switch valued at $7.05 (a 12,666 percent increase);
- $80 for a small segment of drainpipe valued at $1.41 (a 5,574 percent increase);
- $75 for a different piece of plumbing equipment also valued at $1.41 (a 5,219 percent increase);
- $3,000 for a circuit breaker valued at $94.47 (a 3,076 percent increase);
- $4,500 for another kind of circuit breaker valued at $183.30 (a 2,355 percent increase).
Because of what it called weak oversight, SIGIR formally questioned the contract’s costs and recommended reviews of billing practices in all of Anham’s U.S. government contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, which total about $3.9 billion.