It's refreshing to finally see some congressional oversight being exerted over the VA, Pentagon, and the Private Contractors. Something that was woefully lacking for much of Shrub's tenure at the helm...

As McClatchy reports on a recent Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee hearing...

The Department of Veterans Affairs failed to send benefit packages to nearly 37,000 National Guard and Reserve members who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan because it mistakenly thought they were ineligible.

Several senators raised the discovery Wednesday, detailed in a report by the VA's Office of Inspector General, as the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee held a hearing on whether Guard and Reserve members are being adequately informed of the benefits that are available to them.

"While the VA has targeted outreach programs in place to help service members, we still miss far too many veterans who need help and aren't aware of the services and benefits they have earned," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a senior member of the committee.

Murray and others have long criticized the VA and the Defense Department as not doing enough to ensure that the more than 488,000 members of the National Guard and Reserves who've been mobilized and deployed are notified of and receive the benefits they're entitled to.[...]

Murray said a recent Pentagon study found that National Guard members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan were 25 percent more likely to suffer from combat-related psychological problems than active-duty soldiers who've been deployed. In addition, Guard and Reserve members are twice as likely to have their VA claims denied as active-duty service members are, she said.

It should be interesting to see what they propose to tackle the issue...

Even Sen. Byrd and the Senate Appropriations Committee wants answers...

Sen. Robert Byrd, D-West Virginia, leveled the accusations before the Appropriations Committee he chairs. He is calling for arrests and speedy trials for any contractors accused of bilking the U.S. and Iraqi governments.

In a statement released before Wednesday's hearing, Byrd said the military's inability to oversee its myriad contracts adequately has indirectly killed soldiers.

He did not elaborate except to say, "As a result of this lack of oversight, billions of dollars have been lost or wasted, bad contractors have been rewarded, and shoddy workmanship -- some of which has resulted in the deaths of our soldiers -- has gone uncorrected."[...]

Too few auditors and managers have been assigned to oversee contracts, and too few investigators are charged with prosecuting allegations of fraud, waste and corruption and with retrieving "these stolen billions," Byrd said.

"It is evident that our oversight resources have been strained past the breaking point," he said. "Army contracting dollars and actions have increased more than 350 percent over the last 11 years, while the contracting work force has decreased by more than 50 percent."

One concrete proposal for tackling that serious issue was initiated by Senators Leahy and Grassley, whereby they are seeking to extend the Statutes of Limitations for prosecuting those sorry a**holes... We shall see how far that gets...

In a related investigation, Senators Lieberman and Collins, Co-Chairs of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee had requested in 2006 the GAO to investigate the DCAA's audit practices. Ironically, though, I guess they didn't say 'pretty please'...

GAO said it launched the investigation on its own after receiving complaints on a hotline about 14 DCAA audits. It conducted more than 100 interviews of more than 50 people involved in the audits at two DCAA locations in California.

What the GAO did find after looking into it was pretty gruesome...

Auditors at an oversight agency of the Pentagon were pressured by supervisors to skew their reports on a major defense contractor's work, hiding wrongdoing and charges of overbilling, according to an 80-page report from the Government Accountability Office.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency, which is charged with overseeing contractors for the Defense Department, made an upfront agreement with "a major aerospace company" to limit the scope of work and basis for an audit, the report said.

When the contractor, who is not named in the report, objected to the draft findings of the DCAA audit, managers at the audit agency assigned a new supervisor to the case and threatened the senior auditor with personnel action if "he did not delete findings from the report and change the draft audit opinion to adequate," according to the GAO report.

Supervisors at DCAA attempted to intimidate auditors, prevented them from speaking with GAO investigators and created a "generally abusive work environment," the report said.

Hmmm... Not pretty at all! So what did HoJo and Collins have to say...

Lieberman said today: "GAO has substantiated serious whistleblower allegations that show that some DCAA supervisors were cutting corners and pressuring their subordinates to give more favorable audits to contractors than the auditors felt the contractors deserved. This shows a blatant disregard for the safeguards that are supposed to be in place to ensure that contractors charge the government no more than a fair and reasonable price."

Collins said the results "raise serious concerns about DCAA's ability to effectively fulfill its critical oversight mission."

Okay, so what do you propose to do about it? Hmmm...?

"Further work is needed to determine the extent of the problem and what corrective actions are necessary to put DCAA back on the right track, " Collins said in a statement

Further work? Huh? I swear they are both as worthless as teats on a boar hog... I'm not holding my breath on seeing anything come out of these investigations, but, one can always hope! Right???