DoD promises to fix Iraq contracting problems in 30 days

In August, the Commission on Wartime Contracting gave the Defense Contract Management Agency and the Defense Contract Audit Agency sixty days to try to "harmonize their own approaches" to contract management in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since then a "divergence in contractor-employee counts" has come to light, along with some confusion about who is overseeing the drawdown in Iraq.

Commissioner Dov Zakheim told FederalNewsRadio all three can be seen as symptoms of one very large problem: "The Contracts Management Agency, DCMA, and the Contracts Audit Agency need to get their act together," said Zakheim. "They just didn't seem to be working in harness, and we got assurances, very, very firm assurances, from a very senior Defense official, Mr. Shay Assad, who said he's going to have it sorted out in 30 days. And frankly, we believe him."

Counting the Contractors

The problem here, said Zakheim, is the Department of Defense's SPOT (Synchronized Predeployment and Operation Tracker) database "doesn't capture all the contractors and the reason is that not everyone has to register."

There are issues in particular, said Zakheim with foreign nationals. "So, for instance, in Afghanistan, we don't know how many Afghans are really working for us. We think we know in the hand counted census, but even that's uncertain."

While SPOT shows 160,000 Defense contractor employees in Southwest Asia, the Army's Central Command census, compiled manually from dozens of data suppliers, counted nearly 243,000 contractor employees, according to the Commission.

In Iraq, said Zakheim, the manual census and the automated version, SPOT, are "off by less than 250 people and we're talking about a total of 119,000 folks. So that's working pretty well. It's in Afghanistan where it gets really scary."

Managing the Iraq Drawdown

As the military has reduced troop levels, contractors have not kept pace.

Zakheim said DCAA Director April Stephenson estimated that if contractor KBR's systems were in "proper functioning order, the tax payer might save as much as $193 million dollars. They are simply not tracking it as well as they might."

Whether the final figure is $193 million or $93 million, said Zakheim, "clearly there appears to be some shortcoming there."

In fact, Zakheim said that nearly everyone testifying before the Commission thought the number of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan will need to increase, at least for a short time. The commissioner said that as the contractors increase, "the question becomes 'how are they overseen?'" He points out there is already a shortage of Contracting Officers Representatives, "the people who literally oversee what the contractors do in theater. We're short of them now. If contracting numbers go up, we need more of them. I don't know where we find them."

The current agreement between the U.S. and Iraqi governments calls for all U.S. military personnel to be out of Iraq by Dec. 31, 2011.