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The senator says she decided against having hearings on contractors to avoid duplicating the work of other agencies.

By JONATHAN E. KAPLAN Washington D.C. Correspondent January 28, 2008

Democratic Rep. Tom Allen is faulting Republican Sen. Susan Collins for holding a single hearing on alleged corruption and mismanagement of civilian contractors in Iraq.

Allen, who is running for Collins' seat, is trying to turn her tenure as chairman of the Senate's chief investigative committee into a political liability as she campaigns for a third term.

Collins served as the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chairman from 2003 until early 2007, when Democrats took control of the Senate. She held her first and only Iraq contractor hearing in August 2006 on a report issued by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction titled: "Iraq Reconstruction: Lessons Learned in Contracting."

"The war in Iraq the last five years has been the biggest issue. She chaired the committee that had oversight of that issue," Allen said. "She just didn't do the job. She had this enormous power, but she never held a hearing. It is incomprehensible."

Collins challenged Allen's characterization, saying the committee has undertaken important work under her leadership.

The committee investigated government contracting abuses related to Hurricane Katrina and endorsed legislation to create and save the position of special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, she said. The special inspector general has prosecuted and won convictions against contractors who accepted bribes, rigged contracts or performed poor work.

"No one could ever accurately say that I ever hesitated to take on tough oversight responsibilities," Collins said. "This is a page out of the Democratic playbook."

At issue is whether corruption among civilian contractors in Iraq hampered the reconstruction effort and exacerbated the insurgency in the months after U.S. troops toppled Saddam Hussein.

Executive branch agencies and government watchdog groups have uncovered cases of waste, fraud and abuse, some of which have led to prosecution and conviction.

"There was an extreme lack of congressional hearings at a time when Collins' committee should have been at the front of the pack," said Charles Tiefer, a government contracting expert at the University of Baltimore Law School who has been critical of the Bush administration and favors aggressive congressional oversight.

"During the years 2003 to 2006," said Tiefer, a former solicitor and deputy general counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives, "negative information about Halliburton would come out from either the Defense Department's auditor reports or the occasional whistleblower."

Collins' chief antagonist during her years as chairwoman was committee member Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-New Jersey. Now 84, Lautenberg urged Collins to investigate Kellog, Brown & Root, which is now KBR.

Allen's campaign provided the letters as evidence that Collins failed to conduct proper oversight. Lautenberg had asked Collins to investigate whether KBR overcharged various government agencies; Halliburton's relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney, the company's former chief executive officer; Halliburton's dealings with the Iranian government; and its accounting practices.

Collins responded twice to Lautenberg, writing that legislation passed by the Senate would fix problems cited by Lautenberg and that she did not "want to duplicate work already being conducted by the appropriate authorities."

She said in an interview Friday that if senators feel passionately about an issue, they should have personal conversations with their colleagues as Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., did in 2004 when he asked Collins to hold hearings into the Federal Emergency Management Agency's response to hurricanes that ravaged his home state.

Collins held a hearing for Nelson, something she did not do for Lautenberg.

"I continually tried to get the issue of Halliburton and Iraqi contracts...