A program designed to keep tabs on more than $3 billion in foreign development spending has given the government little idea if the funds it has poured into Afghanistan are actually accomplishing anything.
Of 127 contracts and grants given out by the U.S. Agency for International Development since the program was set up in 2013, only one was ever verified by the monitoring system, according to a report made public by USAID’s inspector general over the weekend.
The watchdog found the agency couldn’t reconcile its financial records with the actual number of active contracts in Afghanistan, which means USAID didn’t even know how many projects it was paying for, let alone whether those projects should be continued.
USAID has spent $17 billion in Afghanistan since 2002 through a series of sprawling projects, making effective oversight of its contracts crucial to preventing waste.
“The drawdown in U.S. forces, however, has created significant challenges for the agency,” the inspector general wrote, noting troop levels fell from 100,000 in 2011 to roughly 10,000 in 2015.
“As a result, USAID lost access to regional facilities, from which the staff directly observe activities in the field,” the report said.
The monitoring program was created in early 2013 in an attempt to overcome the challenges posed by the dwindling number of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan.
But it quickly ran into problems that prevented USAID from determining which of its projects were successful and which were failing.
For example, a centralized database meant to track information about Afghan projects had no place to enter actual data.
The flawed monitoring system gave equal weight to firsthand inspections from USAID officials and secondhand reports from the Afghan government, obscuring the accuracy of its data.
Given the holes in USAID’s oversight capability, the inspector general suggested agency officials could easily lose track of costs and benefits.
Investigators cited the case of a contractor that had been tapped to help oversee projects as an example.
Although the firm had been tapped for project management services, it actually lost track of more than $2 million in costs that included “cooks,” “gardeners” and “fringe benefits.”
The USAID inspector general is not the only watchdog to find rampant problems with government spending in Afghanistan.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, known as SIGAR, has uncovered dozens of examples of wasteful spending in agencies from USAID to the Pentagon.
Most recently, SIGAR drew attention to the issue when it reported on a $43 million taxpayer-funded gas station that should have cost just $300,000.
