Washington – The contractor that botched construction of a $75 million police academy in Baghdad, Iraq, so badly that human waste dripped from the ceilings has produced shoddy work on 13 out of 14 projects reviewed by federal auditors, the top official monitoring Iraq’s reconstruction told Congress on Thursday.
In a House hearing on what has gone wrong with reconstruction contracts in Iraq, Parsons Corp. quickly became the focus, taking bipartisan heat for its record of falling short on critical projects.
The Pasadena, Calif., company was supposed to build facilities at the heart of the $21 billion U.S.-led reconstruction program, including fire stations, border forts and health-care centers.
But inspectors have found a litany of flaws in the firm’s work.
A prison, the one project reviewed by auditors that was being constructed correctly, was taken away from Parsons before its completion because of escalating costs.
In a report released Thursday, inspectors found that the Baghdad Police College posed a health risk after feces and urine leaked through the ceilings of student barracks.
The facility, part of which will need to be demolished, also featured floors that heaved inches off the ground and a room where water dripped so heavily that it was known as “the rain forest.”
The academy was intended as a showcase for U.S. efforts to train Iraqi recruits who eventually are expected to take control of the nation’s security from the U.S. military.
But lawmakers said Thursday that they feared it will become a symbol of a different sort.
“This is the lens through which Iraqis will now see America,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. “Incompetence. Profiteering. Arrogance. And human waste oozing out of ceilings as a result.”
Stuart Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, said the project failed in part because Parsons had fallen down in its responsibility to manage the work. “It boils down to a lack of oversight,” Bowen said.
His office will go back in the coming months to review all of Parsons’ work in Iraq, which totals about $1 billion.
Parsons senior vice president Earnest Robbins II acknowledged the police academy construction was unacceptable but told congressmen that poor work by Iraqi subcontractors, tight deadlines and a deteriorating security situation were to blame.
“We awarded over 1,700 subcontracts to Iraqi firms, and at the peak of construction we had over 11,000 Iraqis employed,” Robbins said. “Even the day-to- day oversight of those Iraqi subcontractors was, as a result of cost and security reasons, conducted almost entirely by Iraqis hired and trained by Parsons.”
