According to an audit performed by the inspector general of salaries paid to soldiers and police in Afghanistan US taxpayers are victims of major fraud. For many years that we have been paying salaries of Afghan security forces in the form of soldiers and police meant to assist US troops we have apparently been paying salaries to people that do not actually exist.
Not only has this fraud cost American taxpayers an average of 300 millions dollars a year from 2008 to 2017, but it also put US soldiers at risk. It is estimated that somewhere between 40% and 60% of the salaries that were being paid to Afghan personnel were actually nonexistent "ghost soldiers". Where this became a problem was when US troops requested assistance and the troops that they requested were not available, troops whose salaries were being paid for by US taxpayers.
“We’ve been raising this concern about ghosts going back a number of years,” Sopko told Sharyl Attkinson of Full Measure.
“Actually I want to say we heard about it from (Afghan President) Ashraf Ghani years ago, before he became president, he warned me about ‘ghosts,’ so we started looking three years ago.”
“What we’re talking about are policemen, Afghan policemen, Afghan military, Afghan civil servants who don’t exist or they have multiple identity cards and we’re paying their salaries,” he explained. “By ‘we’ I mean the United States and the international community. And we started finding out that we had no capacity to measure the number of soldiers, teachers, doctors, military people who we are paying their salaries.”
“In January 2015 we reported that more than $300 million in annual, U.S.-funded salary payments to the Afghan National Police were based on only partially verified or reconciled data, and that there was no assurance that personnel and payroll data were accurate. We found similar deficiencies during the course of our April 2015 audit of Afghan National Army personnel and payroll data,” wrote Sopko.
That’s not just fraud, folks. According to Sopko, it’s “Major fraud. And what’s happening is the commanders or generals or other higher officials are actually pocketing the salaries of the ghosts.”
“And I remember President Ghani again, at that time he wasn’t president, saying, ‘John, you the United States government are paying the salary of an Afghan who’s a teacher, he’s a civil servant, he’s a doctor, he is a policeman, and he’s a soldier. And it’s the same Afghan. And he doesn’t exist,’” Sopko explained.
“It’s not just the salaries,” he added. “But we’re funding schools based upon the number of students, so if you invent or inflate the number of students, you’re going to be paying more money. On the soldiers and the police, we’re paying for extra boots, for food, for everything else, logistics for numbers that don’t exist.”
Thank God there is a new Sheriff in town who has finally put an end to this wasteful practice. It is a shame that we have no way to discover what actually happened to all of the money that was spent over a period of several years.
Comments