Neither Young nor his attorney could immediately be reached for comment. Young is listed as Inactive Ready Reserve, according to Virginia Keys, a spokeswoman for the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, which was among the agencies investigating the case. Keys said Young was a Special Forces lieutenant colonel while on active duty.

Young pleaded guilty in December to disclosure of procurement information and money laundering in connection with a military contract for services in Afghanistan. U.S. District Court Judge Tena Campbell, in Salt Lake City, sentenced Young to 42 months in prison, followed by 36 months on supervised release.

Between March and June of 2007, Young was deployed to Afghanistan with the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force as an official liaison for Afghan National Security Force Partnering.

During his deployment, while he was involved in the transfer of greater responsibility for Afghanistan’s national security to the Afghans, a decision was made to solicit a pilot contract to train Afghan forces in weapons maintenance and property book management.

Young admitted to federal prosecutors that he had confidential bid, proposal and source selection information concerning the pilot contract and that he disclosed information to two officials of American International Security Corp., which eventually won the contract.

Another defendant in the case, Christopher Harris, who worked as the country manager in Afghanistan for AISC, received more than $17 million during the life of the contract. Harris, 49, of Lake Havasu, Arizona, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit government procurement fraud and money laundering and is scheduled to be sentenced June 23, according to an announcement of Young’s sentencing by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Utah, which prosecuted the case.

“Conduct like we see in this case undermines the confidence of American taxpayers who continue to pay for the cost of our efforts in Afghanistan,” said David B. Barlow, U.S. attorney for the Utah District, in an announcement of the sentencing.

“Young held a position of trust with the United States Army and violated his ethical duties as a soldier. He knew full well that he could not ethically use or disclose the protected information as he did,” Barlow said.

Other investigators in the case were the Army Criminal Investigation Command’s major procurement fraud unit, Defense Criminal Investigative Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations.

The second largest contract recipient is PAE Government Services, which will receive $598 million (15 percent of all State reconstruction funds). PAE was a subsidiary of top federal contractor Lockheed Martin from 2006 to 2011. Last year, former PAE program manager Keith Johnson and his wife, Angela Johnson, pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the military on vehicle parts purchases in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. The Johnsons were sentenced to prison and ordered to pay $2 million for operating a scheme in which Keith steered millions of dollars in orders to a shell company operated by Angela and to subcontractors who provided kickbacks in return.

The third largest contract recipient is Civilian Police International, LLC (CPI) with $54 million in contracts (slightly more than 1 percent of all State reconstruction aid). CPI was formed in 2004 as a joint venture between L-3 Communications subsidiary MPRI, AECOM, Wackenhut, and KBR specifically to handle law enforcement and criminal justice reconstruction projects in Afghanistan. The track records of Wackenhut and KBR are relatively well-known. You might be less familiar with MPRI, a company founded in 1987 by retired senior military officers that maintains a lucrative relationship with the Pentagon. Earlier this year, MPRI paid $3.2 million to settle allegations that, between 2005 and 2010, it submitted false labor charges on a contract to support the U.S. Army in Afghanistan by billing for employees who had not performed any work. Several years ago, MPRI briefly gained notoriety for its tax avoidance shenanigans (as did KBR).

At this point, you should be wondering why the State Department has entrusted billions of taxpayer dollars to these three particular contractors. The law requires the federal government to award contracts only to responsible vendors—those with satisfactory records of past performance, integrity, and business ethics. Yet the aforementioned incidents certainly reflect poorly on the responsibility of DynCorp, PAE, and three of the four companies that comprise CPI. This is yet another example of the government’s overreliance on contractors and, in the case of MPRI, the influence of the revolving door.

SIGAR requested from all Afghanistan reconstruction agencies comprehensive information about how and where funds have been spent since 2002. We anxiously await future SIGAR analyses, particularly for the two agencies with an even larger role in the reconstruction—the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Department of Defense.