Blackwater’s 2004 Iraq Contract with State: A ‘Pyramid’ Scheme

More goodies from our Blackwater FOIA: the security company employed such creative accounting methods that it charged the State Department from the profit it made off its 2004-edition Iraq contract.

A January 2005 audit performed for State’s inspector general discovered several of Blackwater’s accounting irregularities. But how the company accounted for its profit is perhaps the most impressive. Blackwater hid its profits within its “dedicated overhead” — that is, the expenses it incurred in the cost of fulfilling its contractual obligations. Here’s what happened:

This results not only in a duplication of profit, but also a pyramiding of profit because, in effect, Blackwater is applying profit to profit. As a result, we have questioned the proposed amount in total.

That might not be a traditional pyramid scheme per se, but conceivably, it could have yielded an infinite regression — Blackwater makes money, charges State for it, makes more money, and so forth. So did it work like that?

I don’t know! And why don’t I know? Because, in its release of the 2005 report, State blacked out every section that detailed exactly how Blackwater’s bookkeeping ripped off the taxpayer. For instance, here’s what it says about the profit-pyramiding effort.

Note 6 — Profit
[redacted]
Profit is a matter under the purview of the contracting officer.

It’s worth remembering that classification procedures exist to protect national security. They don’t exist to protect giant corporations that fleece the public. Someone should tell the State Department.