1
EstablishedThe largest award in the register: Al Muthanna 40MW Electrical Project, $24.5 million (DABV01-04-M-5087). The ten largest alone are 35% of the total.
1,200awards in the register
414million dollars
56,650dollars: the median award
35%of the money in the ten largest
Awards week by week
Many small awards; a few carry the money
On what?
Which office, on what
Governorates in award scopes
The fifteen largest awards
Who won, with whose money
Whose money, and how much competition
Who got the Iraqi money
The largest contractors
2
LikelyThe CPA paid for audits and publicity of its own: Audit of External Debt of Iraq $13.2m, Ad Campaign to Educate Iraqis $5.9m. The audit of the Development Fund for Iraq is what produced the statements in “The Iraqi dollar’s path”.
3
EstablishedAnbar in the register: 2 awards worth $0.17 million, the governorate that drew 36% of reporters’ questions’ references to governorates. Most named in award scopes: Basra 35, Babil 35, Kirkuk 34, Karbala 20.
4
EstablishedOne week carries 28% of the register’s money: the week beginning 5 April ($115 million in 68 awards), with vehicles and body armour worth tens of millions. It is the week of the Fallujah siege and the Mahdi Army uprising, but the body-armour tender closed on 2 April, before both. The timing is established; causation is doubtful.
5
EstablishedOf $1,617 million of Iraqis’ money (the Development Fund for Iraq, vested and seized assets) in the inspector general’s table, $1,133 million (70%) went without competition. The largest: five KBR task orders worth $942 million under “oil well shut down, oil spills”, December 2003 to March 2004, all sole-source, then an “electricity transfer” contract to Karadeniz for $134 million, also sole-source.
6
EstablishedMatching the register to the inspector general’s table on contract number and the exact dollar value names the winner of 13 of the fifteen largest awards: Al Muthanna 40MW Electrical Project → Foster-Thompson; VEHICLES → General Motors; Body Armor → Mushriqui Consulting; VEHICLES → Faouzi Khouri & Sons; Broiler Layer Protein Concentrate → Provimi Jordan; Audit of External Debt of Iraq → Ernst & Young.
7
EstablishedThe largest contractors in the whole table (by recorded value, much of it ceilings): KBR (Kellogg Brown & Root) $16.3bn, Parsons $2.5bn, Fluor / FluorAMEC $2.1bn, PAE / Homeland Security Corp. JV $1.8bn. Those in the directory:
KBR Parsons Fluor DynCorp Washington Group Perini Contrack SAIC
8
DoubtfulThe register itself is untidy: 19 verbatim duplicate lines ($4.7m, dropped from our sums), 31 contract numbers carrying two different awards (e.g. DABV01-04-C-0034, DABV01-04-C-0036), some of them a wrong year digit: the inspector general’s table has 03 where the register has 04. Its title says “to 10 April”; it runs to 24 April.
9
Open questionWho won the rest? The match names the winner of only 16 of 1,200 awards; the inspector general’s table lists only large contracts ($5 million and up), and says Iraqi contractor names are available “by written request”.
Method, confidence and limits
Source: the CPA Contracting Activity’s “Register of Awards” in section 11, in two copies: the CPA website version captured by the Internet Archive on 14 April 2004 (document), and the longer University of North Texas copy (to 24 April, document). Figures here come from the second.
Reading: each line is anchored on “date + price”; before it come the solicitation number, contract number and scope. Verbatim duplicate lines are dropped. Category: keywords in the scope (police, substation, water…) in a fixed order; an award goes to the first category it matches, so categories are approximate. Office: inferred from the first digit of the contract serial (0 Baghdad, 2 electricity, 3 North, 5 South, 8 South-Central), from the place names in scopes: series 3 names Kirkuk, Mosul and Erbil; series 5 Basra and Nasiriyah; series 8 Hilla and Karbala.
Privacy: we do not publish every scope because some carry individuals’ names (halls or projects named after people). The full table carries date, price, contract number, category and office; the scope text only for the fifteen largest, after review.
Who won: Appendix K of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction’s report to Congress, 30 January 2005: the “List of Contracts” its auditors verified to 31 December 2004, by contracting agency, each with number, scope, contractor, date, type, value, fund type and competition. Iraqi money: the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), vested and seized assets. US money: the Iraq Relief and Reconstruction Fund (IRRF) and Army appropriations (OMA, MILCON, CERP). Value: the table’s “total value”, often the ceiling of an open-ended contract or a task order under one contract, so sums show scale, not actual spending. Names: contractors are matched against a hand-written list of patterns (company names only); lines with no legible name stay unnamed. The match: a register award and a table contract count as one when the contract letter, serial number and dollar value all match exactly.
Limits: the register covers under four of fourteen months, and excludes the large US agency contracts (such as reconstruction contracts) that did not pass through this office. Naming a governorate in a scope does not mean all the money was spent there.