“For example, vendors paid bribes or kickbacks to implementer staff in exchange for competitive bidding data,” Barr said. In one case, she said, a Turkish vendor put more salt and fewer lentils in food kits to increase profits; in another, investigators found a warehouse in Syria contained useless frying pans and tiny tarps too small for an adult to fit under.

Barr said the agency has received 116 complaints of alleged abuse and opened 25 investigations. About two-thirds were related to theft and fraud schemes, including collusion, product substitution and false claims, rather than terrorist diversions.

“Despite our goodwill, bad characters have taken advantage of the complex situation for personal gain, ultimately denying Syrian people the food, clothing, health care and other aid they urgently need ,” US Agency for International Development (USAID) Inspector General Ann Calvaresi Barr said at a July 14 hearing of the House Foreign Affairs Middle East panel.

While the United States has provided more than $5 billion in humanitarian aid to date, it relies on third parties to distribute it inside the war-torn country. In a July 14 report to Congress, the Government Accountability Office said that many of those partners adequately plan for security hazards but not for the risk of fraud.

The Obama administration has launched 25 investigations into alleged abuse of US assistance to Syria amid concerns that partners on the ground aren’t doing enough to prevent fraud, government watchdogs told Congress.

To minimize such risks, the GAO report said, USAID and the State Department should require their partners to conduct assessments of fraud risk and ensure that USAID field monitors are trained to identify potential fraud risks and collect information on them.

“Absent assessments of fraud risk, implementing partners may not have all the information needed to design appropriate controls to mitigate such risks,” GAO International Affairs and Trade Director Thomas Melito said at the hearing. “In addition, State and USAID officials may not have sufficient awareness of the risk of threat or loss due to theft.”

With US assistance only reaching about 4 million of the 13.5 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, Melito said, any instance of fraud “is literally taking food out of the mouths of babies.”

Panel chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., and top Democrat Ted Deutch from Florida, requested the report.

“With no end in sight to the Syrian conflict,” Ros-Lehtinen said, “it is absolutely vital that we ensure that the taxpayer dollars that are used in support of these efforts are being used efficiently and effectively.”

The GAO said some level of wasted aid is inevitable given the difficult circumstances.

“Effective delivery of US humanitarian assistance to people inside Syria is complicated by three related factors — a dangerous operating environment, access issues and remote management of programs,” the report states. “These factors can hinder the delivery of humanitarian assistance and, because US agency officials must manage programs from outside of Syria, create challenges for financial oversight, such as increasing the opportunity for fraud and diversion.”

The GAO said USAID and the State Department have agreed to its recommendations, but Melito said more could be done. Asked to provide an estimate of the amount of Syrian assistance lost to fraud and how much of it is acceptable, he said the two agencies simply don’t know.

“I don’t think they’ve done the work to address that, nor have they thought about what is their risk tolerance,” he testified. “That’s a dialogue that they need to have going forward.”