It’s Official; Inspector General Says Halliburton Violated Regulations To Hide Corporate Behav

Anne Plummer Flaherty for AP reports: The Halliburton subsidiary that provides food, shelter and other logistics to U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan exploited federal regulations to hide details on its contract performance, according to a report released Friday. The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction found that Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root Services routinely marked all information it gave to the government as proprietary, whether it actually was or not. The government promises not to disclose proprietary data so a company's most valuable information is not divulged to its competitors. By marking all information proprietary — including such normally releasable data as labor rates — the company abused federal regulations, the report says. In effect, Kellogg, Brown & Root turned the regulations "into a mechanism to prevent the government from releasing normally transparent information, thus potentially hindering competition and oversight."