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U.S. Dept. of Defense Spends $43 Million on the "World's Most Expensive Gas Station"
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has found another tale of fraud [bbc.com], this time involving the "world's most expensive gas station" [npr.org]:
"DOD charged the American taxpayer $43 million for what is likely the world's most expensive gas station." That's what Special Inspector General John F. Sopko found when he looked at the construction of a natural gas station in Sheberghan, Afghanistan.
According to the report, at most that station should have cost about $500,000. But in this case, the Department of Defense's Task Force for Stability and Business Operations awarded Central Asian Engineering a contract to build the station for a little under $3 million. But somehow the spending got out of control. Here's how the inspector general explains it in the report:
The Task Force spent $42,718,739 between 2011 and 2014 to fund the construction and to supervise the initial operation of the CNG station (approximately $12.3 [million] in direct costs and $30.0 [million] in overhead costs).
To make matters worse, the inspector general found that the Department of Defense didn't even study whether a natural gas station would be used in Afghanistan. And when the IG came asking questions, the Department of Defense said that all the people who worked on the project were gone, now, so they could not provide answers as to why a project that should have cost $500,000 ended up costing nearly $43 million.
NPR's article lists previous coverage [npr.org] of wartime corruption and waste in Afghanistan. For example, $7.6 billion has been spent [npr.org] on countering opium poppy production in Afghanistan, yet production reached an all-time high in 2013.
