A government watchdog that examines nation-building in Afghanistan told senators that the Pentagon may be concealing evidence of rampant Department of Defense waste and fraud in the country.
John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) on Wednesday alleged that the department has not been forthright with his office about the activities of the now-shuttered Task Force on Business and Stability Operations (TFBSO).
“The data provided is substantially inadequate,” he told a Senate Armed Services subcommittee.
“That seems extraordinary for an organization that lasted for 5 years and employed up to 80 people,” he added, when noting he received only 100 Gigabytes worth of data on TFBSO from the Pentagon. “There is obviously a lot of data missing in this hard drive we got.”
Sopko said that he was also concerned about “missing major email files,” and that his office now has “forensic accountants reviewing [the hard drive] to determine if it has been manipulated.”
In several reports on the reconstruction effort, SIGAR has knocked the TFBSO, which Congress ordered to be closed at the end of 2014, for wasteful spending, including a wildly over-budget $43 million compressed natural gas station.
The agency was also criticized for spending $150 million—roughly 20% of its budget in the country—on lavish villas and private security forces for only a handful of TFBSO employees.
Despite the findings, Sopko lamented to lawmakers that the execution of his job is being hindered by Pentagon stonewalling–specifically in response to inquiries about the task force.
“Since December 2014, the Department of Defense has been telling us because of legislation Congress passed, they have no authority, no money, and no bodies to explain this important program to an in Inspector General who is required by statute to investigate allegations of waste, fraud, and abuse,” Sopko said.
“In my twenty something years in Congress, I have never heard of that excuse,” he added, claiming that the agency is suffering from “institutional amnesia.”
Sopko warned that if the obstruction continues, “it will be bad for oversight, bad for criminal investigations that we’re committing, and bad for US taxpayers.”
Beginning in 2009, the TFBSO spent $638 million on business projects in Afghanistan, including efforts to help the Afghan government develop its mineral resources economy, estimated to be worth more than $1 trillion.
SIGAR reported last week that the task force left all but three resource development projects incomplete before winding up its operations.
