Pentagon Unable to Account for Missing Iraqi Millions
Source: cnbc.com
The Pentagon doesn’t know what happened to more than $100 million in cash held at Saddam Hussein’s palace in Baghdad during the Iraq war, according to a new report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.What’s more, the Pentagon can’t find documents to explain what it spent as much as $1.7 billion on from funds held on behalf of the Iraqi government by the New York Federal Reserve, the report says.
The missing records raise new questions about how the US government handled billions of dollars in Iraqi funds during the war.
The new report, the latest in a multi-year investigation by the inspector general into missing money in Iraq, paints a picture of Pentagon officials digging through boxes of hard copy records looking for missing paper copies of Excel spreadsheets, monthly reports and other paper documents that should have been kept detailing what the money was spent on and why those expenditures were necessary. Apparently, there are no electronic records to back up the spending.
The Inspector General’s report concludes that the problem is simply one of “records management.” But the report explains the missing records make it impossible to conduct a complete accounting of what happened to the funds.
The missing money came from the Development Fund for Iraq, a cache of billions of dollars in frozen Saddam Hussein regime assets that was held at the New York Federal Reserve on behalf of the Iraqi people.
After the Coalition Provisional Authority turned over sovereignty to the new government of Iraq in 2004 after the US invasion, the government of Iraq turned over about $3 billion of the money to the Pentagon to help pay for contracts the CPA had authorized before it ceased operations. Of that money, most was held in an account worth about $2.8 billion at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and the remainder, $217.7 million, was held in cash in Saddam’s palace.
While the New York Federal Reserve was able to provide the Inspector General with some information on electronic payments made from the funds it held, the Department of Defense was unable to provide documentation to explain why it had authorized that expenditure of $1.7 billion of the funds held at the New York Fed. And although the Pentagon spent $193.3 million of the cash at the presidential palace, officials there told the Inspector General that they could not find documents to support $119.4 million of that spending.
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Read the full article at: cnbc.com
Top Image: Illustration by John Blackford. By Peter van Agtmael/Polaris, Konstantin Inozemtsev/Alamy.
U.S. tracks millions (out of billions) of dollars stolen "by Iraqi officials"
