Two New York Times reporters exposed another case of government fraud recently in an article that explains the questionable dealings of the CIA, Air Force and Dennis Montgomery, a computer programmer from California.
“Montgomery and his associates received more than $20 million in government contracts by claiming that software he had developed could help stop Al Qaeda’s next attack on the United States,” Eric Lichtblau and James Risen wrote. “But the technology appears to have been a hoax, and a series of government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force, repeatedly missed the warning signs.”
Their findings begs the question — who is watching these contracts?
The Project On Government Oversight is trying to do just that.
POGO is an independent watchdog organization that tracks and monitors government contracts for fraud and misuse.
On its website, POGO lists 100 cases of federal contract misconduct. Since 1995, POGO reports there have been 748 contract misconducts.
Neil Gordon, an investigator at POGO, said it is the government’s job to police itself, but in the economic downturn, there are few funds to support internal accountability.
“Government auditing agencies have had a lot of their powers taken away,” Gordon said. “Overall, the problem is that they don’t have the resources to track contractors throughout the process, from start to finish.”
Despite a tighter belt on auditing manpower and resources, government spending steadily rises.
“In 2000, [the government spent] a little over $2 billion on government contracts, but now it is more than 530 billion,” Scott Amey, another investigator at POGO, said. “We have moved to a system that on spends money as fast as possible, but at the same time, we’ve had restrictions on oversight. It is a recipe for disaster.”
POGO is not alone in its efforts.
Since 2009, The Center for New American Security has investigated government contracts in war zones. In one of its papers, it questioned the role of private contractors in taking over the role of federal officials in Iraq.
The nonprofit journalism group Center for Public Integrity, founded in 1989, dedicates its focus to investigating federal and private wrongdoing, especially companies funding election campaigns. In 2006, the Sunlight Foundation followed in the Center’s footsteps, advancing government transparency through aggregating and digitizing both new and old information.
In The New York Times’ investigations into government contracts with Montgomery, the reporters detailed one such disaster, costing the country in not just money, but national security.
“The software he [Montgomery] patented — which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines — prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003,” Lichtblau and Risen wrote.
To prevent these missteps, POGO monitors contracts and agencies through government insiders.
“We are not auditors,” Amey said. “We don’t have access to those records, so we try to work with insiders that have witnessed waste, fraud or abuse in government spending or programs. We try to work with them in the various branches to expose and remedy those systemic problems.”
The future of government auditing and oversight is uncertain, Amey said, especially with more budget cuts on the horizon.
“I’m hoping we’re always a part of the system,” Amey said. “Tax payers deserve the additional scrutiny, making sure the money is being spent wisely and taking a look at both the policies and the programs to make sure the agencies are meeting the mission in the most fiscally responsible way.”
