Audit: U.S. $1.2B is somewhere in Iraq

WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- A U.S. federal audit of a State Department's private security contractor in Iraq showed Tuesday $1.2 billion can't be accounted for in police training expenses.

The 20-page report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction said DynCorp International, the largest private contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, "did not have the information needed to identify what DynCorp provided under the contract or how funds were spent," CNN reported.

Stuart Bowen, the chief of SIGIR's Washington office told The New York Times the police training contract "appears to me to be the weakest-staffed, most poorly overseen large-scale program in Iraq, " adding "when you put two people on the ground to manage a billion dollars, that’s pretty weak."

State Department spokeswoman Susan Pittman told CNN the understaffing has been worked on since January, and that the four-person Washington staff will soon be hiked to 11, and two more staff members will be added in Baghdad once their security screening is complete.