Brewster's millions? Amateur

In a story too honestly retarded to be made up, the US government has spent over a billion dollars and doesn't even know what they don't have to show for it. Private US firm DynCorp was contracted to train an Iraqi police force, and so far the results of $1,200,000,000 seem to be ten cabinets of dodgy paperwork and probably a distinct rise in the "Lamborghini:DynCorp employee" ratio. To put that into perspective, a more permanent and effective drop in the crime rate could have been achieved by giving every citizen of Iraq forty dollars and asking them to stay indoors for half an hour.

The best bit is the lovable naivete displayed by those investigating the crime. Auditors claim that the project is so badly managed that it's impossible to find out where the money went, apparently not realising that when somebody takes a thousand thousand thousand dollars from you and fixes things so it's impossible to trace, they managed what they were doing really well. DynCorp insists that there was no "intenional fraud", a phrase that I genuinely don't need to say anything about to make it funnier, but they haven't ruled out slipping on a banana peel, falling onto a keyboard and accidentally misappropriating enough money to give everyone in Cyprus a thousand dollars.

They say the state department could take up to five years to check through the records and prove improper expenses, which shows that they just don't understand the correct attitude for spending twice the gross domestic product of Gambia. This isn't like being too scared to complain to a used car salesman, guys. When you spend a billion dollars you don't have to prove shit about what happened to it - it's up to the people you paid to prove that they did it, and prove they did an absolutely perfect job worth a thousand goddamn million (fucking) dollars. If that's too complex, just say "Where's my police force?", count to ten, and if there's no trained civil authority structure standing there then you ask for your money back.

How do you get as far as nine zeroes before checking that something is actually being done with the money? I'm pretty sure it wasn't all handed over in a single awards ceremony with a cheque the size of a tennis court, which means that at some point somebody had paid over a hundred million dollars, thought "I wonder why these guys haven't started building anything and spend all day with hookers in a swimming pool shaped like a hand giving me the finger", then shrugged and kept pouring cash into the great big bottomless pit.

It doesn't help that DynCorp sounds like the most madeup business name since "Legitimate Businesses Inc". If I walked into a building marked "DynCorp" I'd expect to be attacked by hundreds of identically-rendered security guards tripping over the pistol ammunition inexplicably lying around the floor. Those trying to use the same tactic on their next tax return should rename themselves "John McRealPerson" and send in a folder of haiku-based sudoku instead of their W2 this year, for a fun and exciting demonstration the governments grasp of priorities between "Billion dollar scam" and "Actual citizen forty dollars short".