Obviously this won’t come as much of a surprise:

The DOD is investigating whether a Halliburton subsidiary has overcharged the Navy for hurricane reconstruction.

We’ve been documenting Halliburton’s atrocities for years now, so one more example of their thieving “business practices” wouldn’t ordinarily rate a post at this point. The hurricane reconstruction contracts, like those that Halliburton has abused in Iraq, already guarantee a profit:

A review of [Halliburton subsidiary] KBR’s bills to the Navy by the Department of Defense’s inspector general for work last year restoring Navy facilities in Pensacola, Fl, damaged by Hurricane Ivan suggest KBR may be charging the Navy too much in labor.

Like its contract in Iraq, KBR’s Navy construction contract is a cost-plus award arrangement. That means the company earns more in profit if its costs are higher, because its profit is figured as a percentage of the contract’s cost.

But an ordinary profit has never been enough for Halliburton/KBR, especially when it’s coming from taxpayer funds. So why is it that despite overwhelming recent evidence of fraud, bribes and ripoffs, the government insists on handing them the keys to the Treasury? Well, for staters, there was no record of Halliburton’s transgressions in government databases:

…the report said the Army and Navy had failed to consider KBR’s performance under the controversial $13 billion Iraq logistics contract, a contract that has included documented bribery, kickbacks, and overcharges.

KBR’s past performance on government contracts was one of the major measures by which it was supposed to be judged for the new contract, but neither the Army nor the Navy had entered the Iraq contract information into a military database that tracks contractor performance.

Of the 36 task orders completed on the Iraq Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, only one, worth $1 million, had made it into the database. The $209 million task order that included kickbacks worth $6 million paid to KBR employees was not entered into the database, and therefore was not considered by the Navy in its source selection.

Add to this Big Time being Halliburton’s former CEO, and their incredibly generous contributions to Republican politicians, and you have that perfect blend of incompetence and corruption patented by the Bush administration.