Pentagon Dumps Top Auditor

April Stephenson had only been director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency since February 2008.

 WASHINGTON, D.C. — April Stephenson had only been director of the Defense Contract Audit Agency since February 2008.

But now she has been reassigned inside the Pentagon, according to internal email messages.

No specifics were given for her removal.

The Defense Department, however, noted that it wanted “to bring a fresh perspective to an organization critical to stemming waste and fraud in military spending,” as the Associated Press explained.

Stephenson, who was replaced with a senior civilian Army official, had been a fierce critic of defense contractors over suspected overcharges, poor performance, bribery, and other violations of the law.

Actually, that was just KBR, the company of which former Vice President Dick Cheney is the former CEO.

Between 2004 and May 2008, Stephenson said, her staff had sent 32 such cases to the Pentagon’s inspector general.

As Pratap Chatterjee of CorpWatch noted, these KBR cases account for 43 percent of the dollars the Pentagon had spent in Iraq.

“I don’t think we’re aware of a program, contract, or contractor that has had this number of suspensions or referrals,” she told the independent, bipartisan, congressionally mandated Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Still, the Pentagon already agreed to pay the majority of the $553 million the DCAA audited.

Stephenson’s department is understaffed, she has said, and it has also been found to lack independence from investigating the DoD’s waste without pressure from supervisors to perform on the side of the defense contractors.

“For every dollar GAO (Government Accountability Office) spends, it saves taxpayers $94. At DCAA, the ratio is $5 saved for every dollar spent,” said J.D. Kathuria of ExecutiveBiz.