Suspicions of corruption are hovering overhead again on the land of Kuwait, but this time it is not local, as the Inspector General of the US army bases inside Kuwait revealed that the property documents of his forces witnessed mistakes in the millions of dollars, noting that the auditor’s report monitored the price of one office printer exceeding about 1.1 million dollars, in exchange for the purchase of 82 similar printers for only $412 each.
The inspector general added that the Army’s databases included the listing of a basic fire department simulator worth $36.3 million, although its actual value was only $49,950, reports a local Arabic daily.
According Star and Stripes newspaper, an army property officer told the auditors that he miscalculated the value of 17 refrigerators, as they were calculated at $652,606 each, while their true cost was $24,170, arguing that the lack of accountability led to the skew of the costs submitted to a contractor. Basic operations and security support.
In this regard, the audit team conducted an investigation into the results of the army’s supervision of the area support group contract in Camp Arifjan – Kuwait, as well as Camp Boring, and the auditors compared property books held by the army and the contractor, and both the army and the contractor are supposed to keep track of the amount of government property being provisioned.
In their report, the audit team said the contractor’s records included at least 23,374 more pieces of government property than the military was tracking, adding that unaccounted items may have been lost or stolen without the military’s knowledge.
The report stated that the contractor reported having incurred equipment losses worth $13.5 million over the past 11 years, while military takeover rules state that contractors must be reported to the government when property awarded to them is lost, stolen or destroyed.
He pointed out that without accurate records, the army cannot verify whether the contractor is telling the truth about the amount of government property lost in Kuwait or not, pointing out that the auditors found one of the printers in the contractor’s employees’ apartment outside “Arifjan”, although the text of the contract states that The military must give its consent for the personnel to leave the base.
He added that “the army’s lack of accountability and oversight of the site allowed the contractor to remove the printer from the base,” arguing that government property records overestimated the costs of what it was providing to contractors by $48.3 million.
The report stated that the Army official in charge of managing property books said that an error total had been set in the database for several items, adding that it was possible that other items that were manually typed into Army databases by other property book managers around the world were also incorrect.
The report recommended that the Area Support Group in Kuwait, which did not have policies to correct errors in property records, establish the process, noting that the military identified the problem as dating back to 2011 and would try to find a solution by fiscal year 2026.
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