KBR Wasted Billions in Troop-Support Work
Source: Bloomberg
KBR Inc. wasted billions of dollars through inefficiencies, lax oversight and poor management of its contract to support U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an independent, bipartisan panel.
The contract — to provide housing, food, laundry, mail delivery and fuel for U.S. troops — was ultimately worth $31.7 billion, with most of the work being done in Iraq and Kuwait.
“The services could have been delivered for billions of dollars less,” the commission stated in a report released today at a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform’s national security panel. “Substantial evidence supports the view” that KBR’s services “cost too much.”
The Wartime Contracting Commission, in its first report since Congress established it last year, gives the most critical assessment to date of the contract that Houston-based KBR, then a unit of Halliburton Co., won in December 2001, shortly after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.
KBR’s record may be hurting its chances to win work under a new program for awarding contracts to support U.S. troops. That competition, begun in April 2008, pits KBR against Falls Church, Virginia-based DynCorp International Inc. and Irving, Texas- based Fluor Corp. KBR hasn’t won any of the five orders awarded so far, according to the U.S. Army Sustainment Command.
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