Afghan National Police chiefs and other government officials may be pocketing more than $300 million a year from Pentagon funds meant to cover the force’s payroll.
But the U.S. government has no way of knowing whether the thousands of employees who are paid their salaries in cash actually exist because the Afghan government has resisted repeated calls to verify personnel data, according to a report Monday by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Under such “corrupt practices,” nearly one-fifth of all Afghan National Police staff are at risk of having their salaries cut in half because officers aren’t required to document the payments, the report said.
The U.S. government has poured $15 billion into the Afghan National Police since 2002. Other international donors have contributed billions more to the force through a fund administered by the United Nations.
SIGAR said manual data collection, limited oversight, dysfunctional electronic accounting systems and “little or no physical verification” of active police staff were why millions in U.S. funding may have been lost to “waste and abuse.”
The U.S. has “little assurance that these funds are going to active police personnel or that the amounts paid are correct,” the report said.
IGs at the Pentagon and State Department previously found that personnel data was “unreliable” and that staff totals were “inflated” as early as 2006, noting “a history of … pervasive corruption” in a joint assessment of the Afghan police force in November 2006.
The U.S. embassy in Kabul reported in 2007 that Afghan police chiefs had created “ghost policemen” to pad their personnel rosters and illegally collect extra payments.
In 2009, the Government Accountability Office said it couldn’t confirm the existence of a third of all Afghan National Police personnel.
SIGAR discovered commanding officers signed daily attendance rosters for their patrolmen in a system to “incentivize” officers to inflate personnel numbers in order to collect extra food stipends.
“This makes it possible for employees not performing assigned duties during the work day to go unnoticed or not reported as absent, which could result in personnel being paid for days not worked, either with or without knowledge of supervisory personnel,” the report said.
Although each Afghan National Police recruit is supposed to receive an identification card with a number allowing their payroll and personnel records to be easily located, as many as 60 percent of all records didn’t match with such a number.
The Afghan government had issued twice as many ID cards as it has active personnel, exposing itself to “possible fraud and impersonation,” as well as “security threats” from individuals who could use the cards to gain access to police facilities, the report said.
The force’s electronic payroll system had few safeguards in place to prevent officials from entering false or inaccurate data.
“After nine years of effort, an electronic human resources system … has still not been successfully implemented” despite “lengthy and costly” U.S. attempts to do so, SIGAR said.
Inefficient electronic accounting systems caused some patrolmen to collect larger or smaller salaries than they’d earned. SIGAR cited an example in which an entire province incorrectly collected the highest level of hazard pay for an entire month in a glitch that would have wasted more than $2 million a month if it occurred in every province.
In March 2014, the police force employed 152,678 personnel. The U.S. government used personnel data to determine funding levels for the force and to draft strategy for the draw-down of coalition forces that occurred late last year.
“The window of opportunity to effect change is narrowing and this may be the international community’s last chance to ensure that ANP data collection and reporting processes lead to accurate salary payments,” SIGAR said.
