During the months since Former President Barack Obama left office the truth about his corrupt reign has come pouring out from many different sources. The latest news comes from the Inspector General who is claiming that Obama gave $300 million of American taxpayer’s dollars to “ghost” soldiers who didn’t even exist.
During an interview with Full Measure’s Sharyl Attkinson, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, John Sopko, stated that millions of dollars that came straight from U.S. taxpayer’s pockets were squandered under the Obama administration. The money went to salaries of policemen and soldiers in Afghanistan that never even existed.
The video below explains what happened:
“We’ve been raising this concern about ghosts going back a number of years,” Sopko explained. “Actually, I want to say we heard about it from (Afghan President) Ashraf Ghani years ago, before he became president, he warned me about ‘ghosts,’ so we started looking three years ago.”
“What we’re talking about are policemen, Afghan policemen, Afghan military, Afghan civil servants who don’t exist or they have multiple identity cards and we’re paying their salaries,” he went on to say. “By ‘we’ I mean the United States and the international community. And we started finding out that we had no capacity to measure the number of soldiers, teachers, doctors, military people who we are paying their salaries.”
Back in October of 2016, Fox News had already reported that fraud could have accounted for over $300 million of lost American tax dollars.
Sopko also wrote, “in January 2015 we reported that more than $300 million in annual, U.S.-funded salary payments to the Afghan National Police were based on only partially verified or reconciled data, and that there was no assurance that personnel and payroll data were accurate. We found similar deficiencies during the course of our April 2015 audit of Afghan National Army personnel and payroll data,”
The Independent Journal Review reported that Attkinson noted that the Pentagon is now following through with a biometric system that will check everything from fingerprints, to photos, and also blood type in an attempt to verify “proof of life” and do away with “ghosts” once and for all. She went on to state that the Pentagon claimed they had “up to 95 percent of Afghan police and 70-80 percent of soldiers” already enrolled in the program.
Although it is extremely encouraging to hear that these systems are finally being put into place, it is also extremely disheartening to think of all the taxpayer’s money that has been lost due to fraud over the years. It is extremely unlikely that any of the lost money will ever be uncovered, but hopefully we can prevent these types of things from happening again.