This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Nov. 19, 2010 - WASHINGTON - Slamming the government's record on contracting in Afghanistan, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill lashed out at its chief inspector Thursday for not doing nearly enough to expose waste and fraud in contracts related to the $56 billion that this country has spent so far on Afghanistan reconstruction.
"You are not the right person for the job," McCaskill, D-Mo., told the inspector, Arnold Fields (right), during a contentious hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee's contracting oversight subcommittee, which she chairs.
Fields, a retired Marine Corps major general, leads the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (called SIGAR), which Congress created to track waste and fraud in U.S. contracts in Afghanistan, one of the world's most corrupt nations. SIGAR employs 123 persons, many of them auditors and criminal investigators.
At the packed and at times tense hearing -- at one point, a woman in the audience shouted that Fields should be fired and stormed out of the room -- Fields defended his office's performance and said he had been stung when critics labeled him as inept. "I take this work very seriously," he said, complaining that most of SIGAR's funding had arrived late, hampering his ability to hire staff early in his tenure.
McCaskill, a former Missouri state auditor, bristled at what she regarded as Fields' weak excuses for failing to be aggressive in pursuing contract waste. She complained that the $8.2 million that Fields says his office has recovered or saved is paltry in relation to the $46 million that taxpayers have so far spent on SIGAR. In contrast, she said, the U.S. Agency for International Development's inspector general, operating with a $10 million budget, has recovered or saved about $149 million.
"It's very hard for me to reconcile the notion that a lack of funding has been your problem," McCaskill told Fields. She said that after Congress had given SIGAR additional money and new hiring authority in the summer of 2009, "the organization did not improve" -- performing only one contract audit prior to December 2009 "while devoting time and resources to reviews of subjects outside of its mission."
Last December, McCaskill and two other U.S. senators asked the Obama administration to look into SIGAR, a task assigned to the Council of Inspectors General for Integrity and Efficiency. Its report, issued last summer and detailed in testimony at Thursday's hearing, criticized SIGAR for aspects of its strategy, planning, hiring and choices of audits.
SIGAR has completed 34 audits since its creation in 2008, recovering or saving about $8.2 million and initiating procedures that led to four criminal convictions. In comparison, the parallel Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has produced 177 audits, 171 assessments and evaluations in its nearly seven years of operation. The Iraq special inspector claims to have saved or recovered $151 million, challenged $38 million in payments, and conducted criminal investigations that led to 44 convictions.
The U.S. government's spending on Afghan reconstruction recently topped $56 billion since 2003, about $2 billion more than American reconstruction spending in Iraq. Of the 34 audits SIGAR has completed, McCaskill complained that SIGAR had so far done only four "operational audits" on specific contracts -- even though about 6,900 U.S. contracts in Afghanistan are now active.
She questioned Fields' qualifications -- noting that he had no prior experience as an auditor -- and concluded that he should be replaced. A bipartisan group of senators, including McCaskill, has pressed President Barack Obama to remove Fields.
The subcommittee's ranking Republican, U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., was also critical of SIGAR's efforts, saying he was especially concerned by reports that some U.S. assistance in Afghanistan was ending up in the hands of the Taliban resistance. "American taxpayers need to know where their money is going," he said. Fields said SIGAR is now putting greater emphasis on auditing contracts and promised to deliver more audits in the future. While McCaskill said that was a move the right direction, she complained that SIGAR had paid an outside auditing firm a whopping $6.4 million this year to prepare a slick 160-page report to Congress on its activities.
McCaskill also criticized Fields for his decision to award a $96,000 no-bid contract for two months of work to a former Defense Department inspector general who had resigned in 2005 in the midst of allegations about ethical conduct. Ostensibly, the inspector was hired to be an "independent monitor" of SIGAR's compliance with the government review and to report to the Justice Department on the progress that SIGAR had made.
But McCaskill alleged -- and Fields confirmed under questioning -- that one reason SIGAR had hired the former Pentagon inspector general was the expectation that former FBI Director Louis Freeh, would be working with him on the case. (In the end, Freeh did not do any work related to that contract.)
Asked by McCaskill if the intention had been to ask Freeh to "act as an advocate for [SIGAR] at the Justice Department," Fields said the inspector general's hiring "had nothing to do with influence." Even so, Fields conceded that, "If I had an opportunity to do it all again, I probably would have made another decision."
McCaskill said the main point of the hearing was to show the need for more aggressive auditing of U.S. expenditures. "The government's record on contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan has not been pretty,"
McCaskill said. "That's why it's so important that we have aggressive, independent, quality oversight. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, there's no room for error and no time to delay."