U.S. Agency for International Development officials are not collecting funds contractors could owe the government for work they performed in Afghanistan, a letter from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction said.
Millions of questioned costs have gone uncollected as USAID contracting officers continue to give companies “what seems to be an inordinate amount of time and preference in justifying costs,” according to the SIGAR inquiry.
While USAID officials ultimately have authority over the collection of misspent funds, the watchdog said “recent trends in decisions raise some concerns” about how the agency is approaching its responsibility to recover taxpayer money.
SIGAR cited an example in which it had questioned more than $3 million of costs incurred by a contractor in a July 2013 audit. The USAID contracting officer had found $2.6 million of the questioned costs to be unallowable, reporting that total back to SIGAR.
But the USAID official later reversed his findings after the contractor provided additional documentation that supported some of the costs in question. Auditors were unaware of the decision to collect less than $1.9 million until after it was made, and were not allowed to review the documents until months later.
SIGAR claimed the contractor “had more than adequate time to provide us and USAID/Afghanistan the necessary supporting documentation” at the time the original audit was completed.
In another example from the letter, a USAID official had yet to collect documentation from a company attempting to defend nearly $8 million in questioned costs after repeatedly pushing the deadline back over an eight month period.
“Allowing implementing partners inordinate amount of time to substantiate the costs incurred increases the risks that documentation may be falsified,” the inquiry said.
SIGAR has issued 25 financial audits questioning more than $74 million in USAID contracting funds since its inception in 2008. The agency provided sufficient evidence to satisfy recommendations in only half of those audits, the letter said.
Go here to read the full SIGAR inquiry letter.
