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WASHINGTON — Did you misplace $185,481 somewhere? Just expense it — Iraq style!

A U.S. contractor hired to teach Iraqis about good government physically lost that amount in cash, then claimed the loss as "an expense."

And the U.S. government not only covered the loss, but paid the contractor tens of thousands of dollars more in special fees for overhead and other costs related to the missing money, according to a report by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction.

"SIGIR questions this decision," said the report, released Tuesday.

At issue is an admittedly small portion of money committed in a deal with the nonprofit Research Triangle Institute of North Carolina. It was awarded two contracts in 2003 and 2005 valued at $598 million to help Iraqis work on building local government and representative councils across the country's 18 provinces, said Inspector General Stuart Bowen.

For one thing, Bowen said in Tuesday's report, his auditors couldn't figure out whether the U.S. government got what it paid for in the two huge contracts. Oversight of the contracts has been improved, Bowen said.

In addition to getting the lost money back, the institute also got an extra $57,000 — something the State Department's U.S. Agency for International Development says is standard practice — in fees for administering contracts.