|
More Fancy Math @ Halliburton...Snicker
EFL and a Confession, I Made good money buying HAL & KBR stock during the War, so I suppose I shouldnât bitch...and yet, this seemingly never ending story does make me crazy.Halliburton Co. allegedly overcharged more than $16 million for meals at a single U.S. military base in Kuwait during the first seven months of last year, according to Pentagon investigators auditing the companyâs work. If we canât charge double the going rate for gasoline to our troops, I can see them sitting around a board room saying, Then lets try it on Food... The allegations, involving food-service work done by Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, come on the heels of another KBR dispute and have spurred an expansion of an already widening inquiry into Halliburtonâs government work in Iraq. Last month KBR reimbursed the Pentagon $6.3 million after disclosing that two employees had taken substantial kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor in return for work providing services to U.S. troops in Iraq. KBR also has been accused of overcharging for gasoline under an Army Corps of Engineers contract. The corps has cleared KBR of any wrongdoing, but the Pentagon continues to investigate the dispute. Because of the new meal-billing discrepancies, the Pentagon has extended its audit of KBR food services to include more than 50 other dining facilities in Kuwait and Iraq, according to an e-mail "alert" sent Friday to more than a dozen U.S. Army contracting officials and reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. This dispute focuses on meals served at Camp Arifjan, the huge U.S. military base south of Kuwait City. The e-mail memo that went out Friday said that in July alone, a Saudi subcontractor hired by KBR billed for 42,042 meals a day on average but served only 14,053 meals a day. The difference in cost for that month exceeded $3.5 million, according to Pentagon records. The Pentagon last year paid KBR more than $30 million for meals at the camp from January through July, a tab that included charges for nearly four million meals the government asserts were never served. Pentagon officials couldnât provide an estimate for the total cost of feeding troops in Iraq. Hummmm...14,000 times 3...well, Heck, thatâs close to 42,000 meals, ainât nobody going to notice...but the 4 Million meals not served, that could just be explained as a problem of higher math and a Saudi Vendor. Iâm not being anti-war, but I donât like my tax money being spent this way. In fact, I half way feel that the Iraqiâs themselves should pay for the war, but with these kind of Shenanigans going on, itâs kind of hard to ask. Posted by: Traveller 2004-02-02 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=25454 |