I always find it odd when news reports cite government documents without giving a link or good reference to them. It seems to me that this is something news web sites should do regularly. These reports are not always that easy to track down. Case in point: today's New York Times has a story about a Pentagon report:

• Iraq Spending Ignored Rules, Pentagon Says, By James Glanz, New York Times, May 23, 2008

A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.

Using Google to search on the title of the report plus "site:.gov" yields nothing this morning, although the report is available from two different government web sites.

The report is available at the site of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Committee Holds Hearing on Accountability Lapses in Multiple Funds for Iraq, Wednesday, May 21, 2008, along with other statements and documents.

• Internal Controls Over Payments Made in Iraq, Kuwait and Egypt, U.S. Defense Department, Office of the Inspector General, Report No. D-2008-098, (May 22, 2008).

It is also available at www.dodig.mil/audit/reports with this url: www.dodig.mil/audit/reports/fy08/08-098.pdf The same google search with "site:.mil" substituted for "site:.gov" finds the title in a May 22 "what's new" story on the home page www.dodig.osd.mil of the Office of the Inspector General.

This is the second report I have looked for this week that is available as a PDF document on a government web site that google has (evidently) not indexed full text. I do not know if this reflects a google policy or just a delay in indexing.