LARA JAKES JORDAN

Associated Press

July 16, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — The government has cleared the top U.S. watchdog of Iraq reconstruction projects and his deputy of fraud and abuse allegations lodged by former employees, officials said Wednesday.

On July 3, federal prosecutors alerted the office of Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen that a grand jury declined to indict him or deputy Ginger Cruz.

Last week, on July 9, the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency similarly cleared him and Cruz of any administrative charges stemming from the accusations. The executive branch council was created to investigate allegations of misconduct by inspectors general at federal agencies.

Both notices came in letters to Bowen’s office, said SIGIR spokeswoman Kristine Belisle.

“I always had faith that we’d be cleared of the allegations,” Cruz said in an interview Wednesday. “We knew there was no basis to them.”

Cruz described the investigations dating back to 2006 as “very thorough.” She said it combed through all of her e-mail, and multiple people were interviewed for it.

“To be completely cleared of anything criminal and anything administratively is a very welcome sense of closure for me personally, and the organization,” Cruz said.

A complaint to the presidential council filed by anonymous former staff members in 2006 focused on a number of fraud and abuse allegations, as well as descriptions of possible workplace violations, including sexual harassment. It included charges that Bowen’s office overstated the amount of savings that it generated in order to justify a budget request and that money was wasted on a book project.

A grand jury based in Richmond, Va., was investigating whether Bowen and Cruz inappropriately accessed employee e-mails and used taxpayer funds to pay their legal expenses associated with the 2006 administrative probe, federal officials confirmed in December.

Both Bowen and Cruz denied any wrongdoing throughout the investigations. In a memo released to the media, Bowen said the office paid $32,700 of Cruz’s legal fees and none of his own. He said that SIGIR’s general counsel determined that some of her fees could be paid by the agency since the administrative review “covered actions taken in her official capacity.”

Bowen’s office polices an uneven reconstruction effort in Iraq that has cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 billion. His latest report, issued in April, found that millions of dollars of lucrative Iraq reconstruction contracts were never finished because of excessive delays, poor performance or other factors — including failed projects that are being falsely described by the U.S. government as complete.