Keeping Track of the Billions Spent in Afghanistan -- Wall Street Journal

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (Sigar), John F. Sopko, is in charge of providing oversight of Afghanistan reconstruction projects and activities. Mr. Sopko talked to Risk & Compliance Journal about the difficulties of monitoring contracts in a conflict zone.

What are Sigar’s responsibilities?  --  Mr. Sopko: Our job is to oversee all of the money spent on reconstruction by any agency of the U.S. government in Afghanistan. Up to now that amounts to $104 billion– more than we have spent in any country in the history of the republic. We run audits, inspections and investigations, and do both criminal investigations and audits. We have about 200 people who work for us. Our budget for fiscal year 2014 was $49.7 million.

What are some of the processes you use to investigate allegations?  -- Mr. Sopko: We are looking at records, doing inspections, doing interviews. If someone is supposed to be building a school and we get an allegation the school wasn’t built, we can use satellite technology to see what is there. The difficulty is there are a lot of mistakes with the geospatial records–I don’t know if they’re intentional or otherwise–but a lot of things in Afghanistan we can’t find because the agencies don’t have good geospatial data on what they built and where they built it.

How many companies/people have been charged with wrongdoing? How many have been convicted?  --  Mr. Sopko: Since its inception in 2008, Sigar has initiated 786 cases; 315 are active/ongoing. We have made 89 arrests, issued 106 indictments and won 76 convictions. We have reached civil settlements totaling $14.8 million, issued fines and penalties of $16.9 million and have saved or recovered $492.4 million. 

How do political considerations make your job more difficult?  --  Mr. Sopko: It’s generally difficult go into the Afghan judicial system. Afghan prosecutors and police will not go against powerful people. It’s frustrating. Those prosecutors and police who do help us tend to disappear–I don’t mean dead, they just get transferred or something. We’ve learned you can’t push some of these cases too hard.

What are some lessons you have learned from the Afghanistan experience?  --  Mr. Sopko: One lesson we’ve learned is don’t spend so much money so quickly in such a poor country without proper oversight. You are going to have massive fraud and also have a massive distortion of the local economy and local society. Another lesson is we need to listen to the Afghans. Many Afghans say we didn’t want this stuff, we never used this stuff, we don’t know why you gave us this stuff. And now it is being wasted or stolen because we didn’t listen.  Read More at WSJ