The Foreign Service Journal, November 2004

methods should conduct field audits of international projects. A simple standard auditing procedure will not normally uncover some of the ways of stealing described here. These audits should be primarily focused on large projects and on aggregated expenditures that need to be disag- gregated and traced to their actual source. Behind numbers stand a referent, something real and tangi- ble — or not. Above all, however, audits need to focus on the real issues, not the small potatoes. Once, several years after my wife and I had finished working on a multimillion-dollar project for USAID and were back at home in the States, we received a call from a General Accountability Office (for- merly the General Accounting Office) auditor. He was reviewing the num- bers on our former project and asked us some questions. After we described the project in great detail, he responded skeptically: “There is something here I really don’t under- stand: a $200 expense for the pur- chase of some donkeys. We have not used donkeys since World War I. Why did you need them?” We explained that we used them for transportation into remote moun- tain communities unreachable by jeep. Heavy rains often cut them off from the outside world altogether. “So what happened to the don- keys?” he asked. We told him we had given them to a local farmer in the area who boarded and fed them in exchange for access to the people still working on the project. “Okay,” he replied, “but I wonder how I am going to explain this to my bosses.” “Just tell them not everyone in the world drives a car to work,” we answered before hanging up. We estimated that the cost of our time, his time, and the international telephone call added up to almost as much as our donkeys had cost. More disturbingly, this sincere, com- petent GAO accountant clearly had no idea of the realities of living and operating in the Third World. You’ll never catch thieves that way.  N O V E M B E R 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 59 “Requests for Proposals” represent both an opportunity and a cost for companies wanting to do business with Uncle Sam.