Your Tax Dollars at Work

A government probe into thievery and misuse of government war goods snared a 26-year-old KBR employee for diverting 80 truckloads of jet fuel from Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The fuel was later sold on the local market.

Wallace A. Ward, of Spring Lake, North Carolina, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Washington of conspiring to receive bribes and fraud, the Justice Department announced. He is no longer employed by KBR, which was known as Kellogg, Brown & Root before being spun off by Halliburton last year.

Prosecutors said that Ward falsified paperwork that allowed drivers to show that the 784,000 gallons of fuel, worth more than $2 million, had been delivered to the airfield. According to court documents, the fuel was actually diverted for sale locally between May and September 2006.

KBR was handling the fuel under a contract with the U.S. Army. A separate $5 billion contract with the Army to provide food and housing to U.S. troops in Iraq is now under review, along with two other $5 billion contracts awarded to DynCorp International, Inc., and Fluor Corp. The Army is reevaluating the awards at the recommendation of the Government Accountability Office, which recently concluded that the Army had improperly evaluated the bids.

Democratic legislators and others have contracts awarded to the Houston-based company for its work in Iraq. Some were awarded without competitive bids from rival companies, and other mishandled, critics said. At a Congressional hearing in 2005, for example, a former KBR worker testified that KBR charged the Army for 20,000 meals a day when it was serving only half that number.