Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine

Seems that Dick Cheney's former and future employers just can't quite keep ahead of the impending troubles with their military contracts. Despite getting the work without a competitive bid, despite picking up a plum "Cost-Plus" type contract, despite getting lots of maneuver room because of their close ties to the VP, seems Halliburton can't quite get it right.

From this morning's WSJ (subscription):

The U.S. Army plans to move within months to break up the multibillion-dollar logistics contract that Halliburton Co. has to feed, house and look after U.S. troops in Iraq, and to put out the work for competitive bid.

The move, laid out in an internal Army memorandum, comes after more than a year in which Halliburton's work in Iraq under the contract has been plagued by accounting turmoil and accusations of overcharging. The contract, which the memo values at as much as $13 billion, has been used since early last year to provide massive support services for U.S. troops in Iraq and Kuwait, including housing, dining halls, transportation and laundry.

So what were the problems again?

Pentagon auditors said in a report last month that KBR hadn't provided satisfactory details to back up more than $1.8 billion of work in Iraq and Kuwait. The Army still is debating whether to begin withholding payment on 15% of all billings until KBR is able to resolve the accounting backlog.

Some of those "details" include charging the military for meals that were never served, charging something on the order of 5 times the market price for gasoline and assorted other discrepancies.

I wonder if this will have an effect on how much "deferred compensation" Cheney will get?