OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of organizations (including Sunlight) aimed at promoting transparency in the federal government, released their fifth annual Secrecy Report Card. The report shows that the federal government is increasingly conducting its business in the dark.  This is especially true of the executive branch lead by an administration whose obsession with secrecy surpasses that of even Richard Nixon. “The current administration continues to refuse to be held accountable to the public,” said Patrice McDermott, the coalition’s executive director. As the report says:

The administration of President George W. Bush has over its seven and one half years to date exercised unprecedented levels not only of restriction of access to information about federal government’s policies and decisions, but also of suppression of discussion of those policies and their underpinnings and sources. It continues to refuse to be held accountable to the public through the oversight responsibilities of Congress. We have been made less secure as a result and the open society on which we pride ourselves has been undermined and will take hard work to repair.

Restoring openness and accountability is key to winning back the trust of the public, Patrice said in a press release. “In recent years, polls have shown that a growing number of Americans believe the federal government is secretive-terrible news for our democracy,” she said.

(more…)

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In its May issue, Conde Nast’s Portfolio.com has an unbelievable story about continued financial bumbling by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). Despite spending tens of billions of dollars over the past four years to upgrade its accounting software, the military’s business systems are as unreliable as ever. DoD’s systems are "so obsolete and error prone" that it doesn’t know where large chunks of its $439.3 billion (2007) annual basic budget goes. And that figure doesn’t include the vast sums being spent in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to the report, the agency’s accounting is so dysfunctional it’s impossible for DoD to comply with an 18-year-old requirement by Congress to audit its books. What results is a system that once payments are authorized and money is transferred, there is no reliable way to trace where it ends up. The Portfolio.com article echoes a February article by The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer that profiled DoD’s "labyrinth of arcane and incompatible accounting systems." The News & Observer notes that the accounting problems are not new, and quotes Winslow Wheeler, a project director at the Center for Defense Information, as saying if DoD were a public company, "…it would have gone belly up before World War II."

Both articles lay much blame on the complexity of layers upon layers of bureaucracy partly caused by continued turf wars between the four branches of the armed services. This results in each branch continuing to maintain separate and increasingly outdated business systems that are unable to communicate with each other, trace money disbursements and detect over billing by private contractors.

And guess who picks up the tab for the waste, fraud, and abuse?

Hat tip: TPM.

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Yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a troubling report on the U.S. Defense Department (DoD) hiring of private contractors to assist in its operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It really illustrates how little we know about government contracting and why the lack of transparency is a problem.

Imagine this. DoD doesn’t even know how many private contractors it has on the payroll. AP reports that a senior defense official, in congressional testimony last month, estimated that there are about the same number of private contractors in each of the two war zones as there are American troops, 163,000 in Iraq and 36,500 in Afghanistan. But no one apparently knows for sure. The GAO found that private contractors outnumber DoD employees in some offices, and handle sensitive jobs like writing contracts and awarding fees.

Private contractors are free of ethics regulations that government employees are required to adhere to, setting up situations where corruption can easily flourish and likely never be discovered. Contractors are prohibited from accepting bribes or kickbacks (I suppose that’s something) and the companies hired by DoD are required to have ethic codes. But there are no safeguards against conflicts of interests. And with so many individuals handling so much money with precious little oversight…Well, you get the picture.

GAO, Congress’ watchdog, recommends that DoD require that private contractors it hires be forced to identify conflicts of interest and work to prevent them. That’s a start.

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