Reuters has this to report about Afghanistan contracts:
The United States has spent over $23 billion on reconstruction and development contracts in Afghanistan since 2002, and auditors say about $1 billion of this is waste, a U.S. senator said on Thursday….
McCaskill said the waste identified by auditors amounted to nearly one in six dollars spent on Afghan contracts so far.
Right off the bat, I can see the numbers are wrong here. If a billion dollars is waste, and that waste amounts to “nearly one in six dollars,” then the amount spent is nearly six billion dollars. Where does the $23 billion come from? Or is the “one in six” wrong? All questions an editor should have asked – but I’m not a journalist, what do I know?
Not much perhaps, but I’m the curious type. Five minutes of searching found me this page. Under the heading “Hearing 7: Afghanistan Contracts: An Overview” is a link to view a PDF called “Staff Memo.” (Archived version here) It is the second link on the page as I write this, and this may have well been Reuter’s source for the story, or at least to answer my question about the numbers not adding up. Is this the kind of research we need journalists for, like Reuters and Rupert Murdoch keep telling us?
This is from the very first page of this memo:
- Wasteful Spending on Defense Department Contracts Nears $1 Billion. According to federal auditors, approximately $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs has been submitted by Defense Department contractors for work in Afghanistan. This represents 16% of the total contract dollars examined.
- Afghanistan Contract Spending Exceeds $23 Billion. According to the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS), the United States has spent more than $23 billion on contracts performed in Afghanistan since 2002.
I’m guessing the “nearly one in six dollars” is Reuters’ way of dumbing down the number 16%. The difference, between 16% and 1/6, of $23 billion, is over $153 million – but facts just get in the way of accurate reporting, don’t they? Whatever the case, the number is a fraction of the “total contract dollars examined” – NOT of the total amount spent on contracts as reported by Reuters. How does the reporter confuse this, and how does their editor miss it? Who cares? Here’s what they missed because of their error: Only a little less than $6 billion of the $23 billion total has been examined by federal auditors. If the current ratio of 16% holds – and I know, it’s a mind-bogglingly huge leap-of-faith I’m asking for just for the sake of discussion, especially when you start thinking about pallets of cash gone missing in Iraq, but just as a hypothetical, OK? – then the real amount of waste would be valued at $3.68 billion. Another question Reuters might have asked had they remembered to take their Ritalin, seeing as how they’re reporting on a government in a supposedly democratic country where informed citizenry is key to maintaining freedom in that democracy, is why have only about a quarter of the contract dollars spent in Afghanistan since 2002 been examined by federal auditors? And, while we’re on the subject, why are we having federal auditors examine federal spending?
Again though, I’m not a journalist – so what do I know?
Tags: Afghanistan, Reuters
