Why SABRE can still write the rulebook on scamming taxpayers?

Fed up with corruption in India? Wearing a Hazare topi to work? Don’t despair too soon, because things can get worse. In fact, they already have, in the world’s biggest economy and its sole standing superpower.

There was a time when the Pentagon, America’s gigantic defence establishment, used to spend about Rs 28,000 to buy a single toilet seat. These days, it’s busy all over the world and its activities have got more diversified.

In Afghanistan, for example, to win over hearts and minds, it decided to use militias of local warlords to drive supply trucks. The warlords pocketed 20% of the cash. In Afghanistan, it built a 102-km road at a cost of $1.7 million dollars — per kilometer.

American defence forces believe that it makes sense to splurge money with locals in Iraq and Afghanistan. So, around Kabul and elsewhere, it spent $119 million to rent about 3,000 cars from locals, when it could have run the same number of selfleased cars for less than $60 million.

But such frugality would go against a doctrinal paper called ‘Money As a Weapons System,’ that the Pentagon apparently takes very seriously. The jury is still out on the efficacy of this policy, of course.

If you’re hassled about issues at the workplace, you’d do better than to work with SABRE, a Pentagon security contractor in Iraq. The government paid SABRE $1,700 for each guard it got.

The company paid its overworked Ugandan employees $700 and kept the rest. But of course, the biggest scammer is the giant contractor Halliburton (now called KBR) formerly headed by exvice president Dick Cheney.

It’s been paid more than $36 billion in Iraq, of which it could have salted away as much as $300 million. Clearly, when it comes to graft, wily old Uncle Sam and his Pentagon could still teach us a few tricks.