Pentagon 'hid' damning Halliburton audit - Overcharged US $108 Billion

The Pentagon stood accused of sitting on a damaging report from its own auditors on a $108.4m overcharge by Halliburton for its services in Iraq yesterday. In a scathing letter to George Bush, Democratic congressmen Henry Waxman of California and John Dingell of Michigan said the Defense Contract Audit Agency's audit was completed last October - before the election. They also note that 12 separate requests to the Pentagon to view the completed audits on the contractor's $2.5bn contract to supply fuel and other services in post-war Iraq had been ignored. "We would like to know why this audit report - and audit reports on nine additional task orders - are being withheld from Congress," they wrote. "We also want to know what steps you are taking to recover these funds from Halliburton." In a second public letter yesterday, Mr Waxman accused Bush administration officials of deliberately withholding information on overcharges by Halliburton from UN auditors - at its behest. Some $1.6bn of the $2.5bn Halliburton contract was funded from Iraqi oil revenues overseen by the UN. "The evidence suggests that the US used Iraqi oil proceeds to overpay Halliburton and then sought to hide the evidence of these overcharges from the international auditors," the letter says. The audit, released by the congressmen on Monday, offers the most definitive glimpse so far of overbilling by Halliburton, once run by the vice president, Dick Cheney. In the most startling transaction, it charged the Pentagon $27.5m to ship $82,100 worth of cooking and heating fuel to Iraq from Kuwait - 335 times the actual cost of the liquified petroleum gas, a charge the Pentagon auditors said was "illogical". [more]