Afghanistan: military quagmire and government money pit
Louis Berger, a major construction company headquartered in New Jersey, has agreed to pay out a record $69.3m in fines (pdf), the largest ever such penalty imposed on a contractor working in the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq. The company has been awarded billions of dollars in contracts for the construction of roads, schools and electrical plants in Afghanistan.
Harold Salomon, a former senior financial analyst at the company, discovered that company officials were sending bills for items like the cost of the music system in its Washington, DC office to the US Agency for International Development (USAID).