The government's inability to count contractors on the battlefield risks the security of U.S. troops, the Wartime Contracting Commission said Monday.

Without knowing who and how many contractors are on the battlefield, the government runs the risk that contractors hire foreign nationals without proper background checks.

"It only takes one foreign-national contractor employee smuggling explosives into a dining facility, headquarters, hospital or barracks to create a mass-casualty disaster," said Michael Thibault, co-chairman of the commission. The congressionally chartered reform panel held a three-part hearing on combat contracting management today.

The lack of an accurate count also "makes the jobs of federal contract managers and auditors very difficult … and invites waste, fraud and abuse," Thibault said. "How can we assure taxpayers that they aren't paying for ‘ghost' employees?"

A Defense Department system, the Synchronized Predeployment Operational Tracker (SPOT), is supposed to track the names and numbers of contractor employees on the battlefield serving Defense, the State Department and Agency for International Development. However, an October Government Accountability Office report and the commission found discrepancies between the system's data and actual headcounts. Commissioners expressed concern that neither count is accurate, but the Defense Department considers its manual count more accurate.

For example, SPOT shows 170,000 Defense contractors on the battlefield, but the department's manual census shows nearly 244,000, a difference of 74,000, according to commission data pulled on Sept. 30.

Much of the gap is related to contracts in Afghanistan. SPOT contains information on 30,500 contractor employees, but DoD's manual count is 74,000, nearly 44,000 employees higher, according to the commission. In Iraq, by contrast, the difference between SPOT and the manual census is 230 employees. Contracts in Kuwait and other nations covered by Central Command account for the rest of the gap.

SPOT is inaccurate because agencies have varying requirements to report data, said John Hutton, director of acquisition and sourcing management for GAO.

For example, some Defense offices in Afghanistan only enter counts of those who need authorization to work, which means SPOT accounts for no Afghan employees from those offices, Hutton said. In other cases, offices follow older guidance instead of the 2008 Defense Authorization Act requirement that contractor employee names go into the database after 14 days of work on a $100,000 contract, Hutton said. Other offices still report headcounts, but not names, Hutton said.

Defense has addressed some of the reporting gaps by integrating SPOT with the Biometric Identification System for Access (BISA), which credentials contractor employees working on U.S. installations in Iraq, said Gary Motsek, assistant deputy DoD undersecretary for program support within the Acquisition, Technology and Logistics office. Motsek's office, which runs SPOT, just received funding to integrate the Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT), which is used in Afghanistan, he said.

Part of the challenge is the lack of Internet connectivity in Afghanistan, meaning contract managers cannot readily report to the SPOT and BAT systems, Motsek said. In addition, local Afghans lack reliable national identification cards and many are afraid to have their information reported into a U.S. data system, he said. Further, resistant commanders want to know why they have to spend time reporting the data when they have other priorities, he said.

Contractor employees embedded with troops are required to have background checks and biometric-based access cards, Motsek said. The danger to troops and U.S. civilian employees overseeing projects comes from contractors working off base, who are not required to have the biometric cards and therefore aren't automatically entered into SPOT, he said.

GAO found the problem is larger when looking across the three agencies required to report SPOT.

State reported nearly 9,000 contractor employees supporting contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan, but SPOT only showed 7,000, according to an October GAO report. Similarly AID told GAO the contractor headcount was 16,700 contractor employees, but the number in SPOT was 445.

The report recommended that the three agencies agree on uniform reporting requirements.

The agencies already operate under a memorandum of understanding, but that kind of arrangement lacks the teeth to force the players to take the actions agreed on, Motsek said. And if the government wants to get combat contractor management right, every department in theater should report to SPOT, he said. Although some agencies, like the Justice Department, voluntarily report, there is no legal requirement outside of Defense, State and AID to collect the information, Motsek said.

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