describe the Mühlbauer contract, nor do they label any payments to Mühlbauer by name. Accordingly, the 745.4 billion UGX expenditure figure on national ID systems in Table 1 should be viewed as conservative and underinclusive of actual amounts spent by the Government of Uganda on national ID. For comparison, the Office of the Auditor General (OAG) has conducted two independent reviews of NIRA’s operations, a Value for Money (VfM) review in 2018 and an audit of NIRA’s financial accounts that was done in 2019. During the VfM review, the OAG confirmed that between FY 2014/15 and FY 2017/18 the National ID project had cost 288 billion UGX.8 Meanwhile, the Auditor confirmed that for the 2018/19 FY an approved budget of 53 billion UGX out of which 44 billion UGX was released.9 Budget and expenditure trends Although national ID budgets and expenditures began appearing in various line items of the National Budget Performance Report as early as financial year 2009/10, these amounts reached their peaks between FY 2013/14 and FY 2016/17. According to the NSIS Procurement Report of 2012, all amounts owed under the March 2010 contract were due by mid-2012. Thus, amounts budgeted or spent on national ID after FY 2011/12 should not include any portion of the original Mühlbauer contract value. In FY 2013/14, actual expenditures on national ID were UGX 167.3 billion, versus a budget of 28.9 billion UGX. This 479.3% deviation from budget likely stems from the launch of the NSIS project, but goes almost entirely unexplained in the National Budget Performance Report: significant overages relative to the budget are attributed to “the approved suplementary [sic] release versus the original approved budget.”10 In addition to being terse about the uses of funds related to national ID initiatives, the National Budget Performance Reports do make some passing allusions to obligations to third-party contractors involved in the national ID rollout. For example, in the FY 2014/15 report, higher expenditures relative to budget are partly explained as a “supplementary release made towards settlement of contractual obligations.” Whether these “contractual obligations”11 relate to subsequent contracts with Mühlbauer (or amendments to its original contract12) or other third-party contractors is not clear. 98 Chased Away and Left to Die