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Basically, they wrote a number of contracts (to various companies and organizations) to provide “services or equipment”. If you go and ask for the folders on the contracts to see what it is, or how the thing was completed, or if deadlines were met....these folders meet marginal requirements or less.

It’s like a contract to buy sixty new chairs for a division. You do an audit and find that a contract existed in 2010 for these chairs. So you pull the folder from the financial adviser of the State Department unit, and there’s the contract for the chairs....which lists an expected date and delivery point. But, there’s nothing to say that the chairs were actually delivered. So you look for a receipt, and there is none. Then you look for the payment, and that will exist, but you ask how can you pay if there is no noted paperwork on delivery. So then you waste an hour walking around to ask people and they eventually show you sixty chairs existing that came in that period. The problem is poor financial management....up and down the chain. I worked in a DoD unit where we did every single step, on every single item....even it was a $10 cable....there was a paper-work trail to show the order, the receipt, and the payment. Some would say it’s a waste of time but how can you be accountable unless you do this?

My guess is that most of this is hardware or computer related and they did receive the equipment. But where this was services rendered in some foreign country? I would question just about every angle of that if there is no paper trail.

There needs to be a special audit team put onto the State Department, and people dragged in for demotion if they’ve failed badly on accountability.