A letter (pdf) from House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Henry Waxman (D-Cali.) states that there may be "potentially thousands of criminal cases involving fraudulent contracts in Iraq." Chairman Waxman's letter to Pentagon Inspector General Claude Kicklighter is based on an audit by the DoD IG that found that 4% of 702 transactions examined in a sample worth $1.5 billion "appeared to involve criminal misuse of taxpayer funds." Waxman's staff extrapolated this to the entire pool of 180,000 transactions. Thus, "there may be more than 7,000 potential criminal cases involving more than $190 million in federal spending that have not been identified." He added, "This is an astounding amount of potential criminal fraud."

Waxman requests that the DoD IG spend further resources and dig in to find and prosecute the full extent of the actual fraud. However, unless the DoD IG, Army Criminal Investigation Command and others are fully staffed and empowered to pursue procurement fraud, Waxman's request may be impossible to fully achieve.

-- Nick Schwellenbach