Watchdog eyes State Dept.’s Afghan contract

KABUL: (MEP) – Special inspector general criticizes how contract for training Afghan justice workers was awarded.

U.S. government watchdog found “serious deficiencies” in how the State Department awarded a contract job in Afghanistan, according to a letter from the organization to Secretary of State John Kerry released Thursday, WDSU news reported.

In the letter dated Monday, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko, raised a number of concerns on the oversight practices of the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) at the State Department and how they awarded a contract for the training of Afghan justice workers.

Sopko said the International Development Law Organization (IDLO), the nongovernmental organization awarded the contract, is “ill-prepared to manage and account for how U.S.-taxpayer funds will be spent,” while also criticizing the State Department’s role in awarding the contract.

The United States has maintained that programs such as training and rule-of-law programs are central to ending the international presence in the country and allowing Afghans to take control of their own security.

Those programs involve “millions of dollars” of U.S. taxpayer money the letter said.

“The State Department — for some inexplicable reason — gave IDLO $50 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars, then gave away any oversight of this foreign entity,” Sopko said in a written statement to CNN about the report. “The irony here is that State violated its own written policy and gave them a huge check to teach the Afghans about the ‘rule of law.’ As the saying goes, you can’t make this up. We’re going to get to the bottom of this and hold people accountable.”

Sopko said his office — Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR — was disturbed to learn the agreement for IDLO to take over the contract contained “even fewer oversight requirements” than the agreement for the previous contractor. The letter also cited testimony by a State Department official to SIGAR auditors that IDLO is unable to validate its own spending since it lacks proper international financial certifications.

“It seems ill-considered for INL to have awarded almost $50 million to an organization that may not have the ability to account for the use of those funds,” Sopko wrote, “under an agreement in which INL failed to require proper provisions for oversight.”

In a harshly worded section of the letter, Sopko referred to INL’s assertion that it does not “have authority to compel IDLO to produce information” in the awarding of the contract as “disingenuous.”

INL, the letter says, could have made the awarding of the contract contingent on a certain level of oversight. “This omission is particularly disturbing given that INL chose IDLO as the sole project implementer.”