Better Late Than Never

At the Wall Street Journal Warren P. Strobel and Gordon Lubold report on a development I’m glad to see happening. The Pentagon, State Department, and USAID are preparing to send auditors to Ukraine to monitor how U. S. aid to Ukraine is being used:

WASHINGTON—Top oversight officials responsible for tracking over $110 billion in U.S. military and economic aid to Ukraine said they would press to deploy auditors and investigators directly into the war zone to beef up monitoring as the scale and scope of American assistance expands.

Inspectors general from the Pentagon, State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development said in a joint interview with The Wall Street Journal that, thus far, they have been able to conduct critical oversight tasks remotely using personnel based in Washington, Poland and Germany.

But following a trip by the trio to Kyiv in late January, they said they would press to put some of the 177 auditors and investigators scrutinizing Ukraine aid on the ground in Ukraine. The Biden administration has limited the number of government personnel at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv for security reasons.

The rule of thumb on waste, fraud, and abuse for government programs in the United States is around 3%. That’s not unlike the presumed rate in places like France and Taiwan.

But Ukraine is reckoned as the second most corrupt country in Europe. That puts them about on a level of most African or Caribbean countries. You’ll never guess which the most corrupt country in Europe is.

What if the rate of waste, fraud, and abuse in Ukraine is 20%? 50%? One of the aggravating factors is rate of onset. That’s what we saw in Puerto Rico with respect to aid following the hurricane a year or so ago. A lot of aid just sat rotting on the docks or in warehouses.