Halliburton Tried to Double Its Pleasure, Fun

Even while a Halliburton subsidiary was being criticized for running up bills on a 2003 no-bid contract, government officials were finding similar problems on a simultaneous project.

N.Y. Times:

Even as a Halliburton subsidiary was absorbing harsh criticism of its costs on a 2003 no-bid contract for work in Iraq, the government officials overseeing a second contract wrote that the company was running up exorbitant new expenses on similar work, according to a report issued yesterday by the staff for the Democrats on the House Government Reform Committee.

The report, prepared for a frequent critic of Halliburton, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, was based on previously undisclosed correspondence and performance evaluations from 2004 and 2005.

The documents show that the government’s contracting officers became increasingly frustrated as they tried to penetrate what they considered to be inaccurate or misleading progress reports and expense vouchers filed by the subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root.

In August 2004, one of the officers wrote to the company that “you have universally failed to provide adequate cost information as required.”

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