[Grizzly]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reducing-waste-in-wartime-contracts/2011/08/26/gIQAyqQhlJ_story.html

[Unknown Target]

Hehe, nice title.

Really though is this a big surprise? I mean they've been talking about this sort of stuff for awhile now, will anything change because of this report? More politicians finding something to yell about but what will get fixed and how would we even tell if it was?

[Turambar]

I knew these wars were a bad choice when they started.  I was 13.

[Unknown Target]

Seriously, same. I remember watching Collin Powell presenting those photos of the alleged "missile launchers" and being like wtf is this? That's not good evidence.

[Kosh]

From 2003 but still

A study by the Defense Department's inspector general found that the Pentagon couldn't properly account for more than a trillion dollars in monies spent. A GAO report found Defense inventory systems so lax that the U.S.

Army lost track of 56 airplanes, 32 tanks, and 36 Javelin missile command launch-units.

And before the Iraq war, when military leaders were scrambling to find enough chemical and biological warfare suits to protect U.S. troops, the department was caught selling these suits as surplus on the Internet "for pennies on the dollar," a GAO official said.

And now from 2008

For the first three quarters of 2007, $1.1 trillion in Army accounting entries hadn't been properly reviewed and substantiated, according to the Department of Defense's inspector general. In 2006, $258.2 billion of recorded withdrawals and payments from the Army's main account were unsupported. It's as if the Army had submitted multibillion-dollar expense reports without any receipts.

Waste and fraud? Business as usual.......


EDIT: Couldn't resist adding this juicy bit from page 3 of the second link:

n 1990, Congress enacted legislation requiring all federal agencies to pass independent audits. Every year, the Defense inspector general dispatched dozens of auditors to the military's financial and accounting centers. Every year, they reported back that the job couldn't be done. Defense Department records were in such disarray and were so lacking in documentation that any attempt would be futile. In 2000, the inspector general told Congress that his auditors stopped counting after finding $2.3 trillion in unsupported entries made to force financial data to agree.

In 2002, Congress relented. Until the Pentagon can get its records in order, no comprehensive audit is required. Instead, the department writes each year to the inspector general certifying that "material amounts" in its financial reports can't be substantiated.

That it can't be audited "goes to the heart of the department's credibility," says Dov Zakheim, who was Defense Department chief financial officer and comptroller under Rumsfeld. "Nobody would trust even a half-million-dollar enterprise if its books weren't clean."

The Pentagon has repeatedly assured Congress that it is working toward an audit. Yet the projected date continues to slip further away. In 1995, Pentagon officials testified that it could be audited by 2000. In 2006, an audit wasn't envisioned until 2016.

Without an audit, anecdotal evidence suggests, contractor fraud is likely to go undetected for years. Two South Carolina sisters who supplied small parts to the military bilked it of more than $20 million by charging wildly inflated shipping costs for low-priced items, like $998,798 for shipping two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas. The scheme lasted six years before they were caught in 2006.

[Nuke]

government wastes money

WHY THE **** IS THIS NEWS!

[Unknown Target]

I have a better question; why is it so accepted as a fact of life? Why does government automatically connotate wasted funds? I don't think it was always that way, definitely not in the way we conceive of it today (where government essentially = throwing money away to many people).

[NGTM-1R]

Because it is a fact of life, and has been since we had a concept of government and a concept of money at the same time.

To be honest, we've actually improved. We don't have major officials embezzling from the government so much anymore.

[rscaper1070]

The False Claims Act is there for exactly these types of fraud. I guess there just isn't enough people coming forward with complaints or the DOJ isn't acting on it.

[Nuke]

money gets wasted because politician a gets elected into office and starts a project or a program that requires long term oversight to see it through. politician a's term ends or they dont get re-elected as they had hoped and are unable to see their project through. politician b comes in and either doesn't know how to manage the previous project, or worse, decides its a waste of money and cancels it before it has come to fruition. unfortunately the latter seems to happen more frequently as politicians like to be seen as saving the taxpayers money by eliminating projects that they dont agree with. but i think its a bigger waste to start something and not finish it. you might save some money but you loose whatever the project was meant to accomplish. this whole cut our losses mentality has got to go.

[Aardwolf]

I have a better question; why is it so accepted as a fact of life? Why does government automatically connotate wasted funds? I don't think it was always that way, definitely not in the way we conceive of it today (where government essentially = throwing money away to many people).

This man has a point!

I'm sick of hearing "because that would make sense" as an answer to "why don't they just <reasonable suggestion>".

[NGTM-1R]

This man has a point!

If you're completely ignorant of the nature government and humans in general...sure?

[Mikes]

This man has a point!

If you're completely ignorant of the nature government and humans in general...sure?

Explaining everything with "human nature" is too simplistic.
You are emphasizing humanities worst traits and take them for granted and universal while ignoring our better traits.
You may also find that to a large part organisation, management and (US) culture are the real culprits.

It's not like these are issues that "only" the government suffers from after all. And in the business world you will find both: Examples of much worse corruption as well as companies who have overcome it. The difference usually... all boils down to organisation and management.

[Aardwolf]

Explaining everything with "human nature" is too simplistic.
You are emphasizing humanities worst traits and take them for granted and universal while ignoring our better traits.

 

I think a lot of solutions to real-world problems might actually work if people actually tried them, but instead we write them off as too idealistic.

[NGTM-1R]

I think a lot of solutions to real-world problems might actually work if people actually tried them, but instead we write them off as too idealistic.

Oh hey you're serious. That's pretty pathetic.

Let me lay it out for you yahoos who blame US culture and **** like that.

In the beginning, there was the government. Not the US government, the Sumerian or Babylonian government. And it was hideously corrupt. It formed the prototype for the government after that, and so forth through Rome, the kingdoms of Europe, the British Empire, and finally to here in the US.

You are proposing, in effect, that we can cause magic to happen, rather than the provable, natural, slow refining of the governmental processes to perfect them. We have, compared to the days where the taxman provided his own salary and the kingdom's income was the king's income, made huge strides; as we should.

However this "we will make magic" rapid change **** doesn't work. It never works, without armed conflict to destroy previous systems to back it up, and even then you usually get gradual change anyways.

So, in all seriousness: tell me how you make this stop, without sounding like small children and depending on small children's motives.

[Unknown Target]

Explaining everything with "human nature" is too simplistic.
You are emphasizing humanities worst traits and take them for granted and universal while ignoring our better traits.

 

I think a lot of solutions to real-world problems might actually work if people actually tried them, but instead we write them off as too idealistic.

I agree. A lot of people don't realize how strongly their own perceptions can color their interpretation of everything from history, to world events, to another person saying something in an ambiguous tone.


It's funny, though, that we tell our kids to share, be nice, etc, yet when they become adults we tell them it's ok to disregard these basic principles, and we tell them that through our own example. I saw this kid's show where these two kids were fighting and their parents came by after arguing about their divorce or something, and they tell the kids to remember that their favorite TV show told them to share. The kids do so and they turn to look at their parents and ask "why don't you do that?" and the two of them laugh and say "those rules are only for kids" and walk away. Very cynical but I think that a lot of people feel that way; that the lessons that they learned when they were very young are just for kids, and that once you get older the world gets so complex and so dangerous that it's ok to disregard these basic rules and lessons. Much of the time, I think, these people are the same ones who try to boil the entire world down into convenient yet (I feel) misguided worldviews like "no one ever does anything to be altruistically nice".

[Mr. Vega]

I think a lot of solutions to real-world problems might actually work if people actually tried them, but instead we write them off as too idealistic.

Oh hey you're serious. That's pretty pathetic.

Let me lay it out for you yahoos who blame US culture and **** like that.

In the beginning, there was the government. Not the US government, the Sumerian or Babylonian government. And it was hideously corrupt. It formed the prototype for the government after that, and so forth through Rome, the kingdoms of Europe, the British Empire, and finally to here in the US.

You are proposing, in effect, that we can cause magic to happen, rather than the provable, natural, slow refining of the governmental processes to perfect them. We have, compared to the days where the taxman provided his own salary and the kingdom's income was the king's income, made huge strides; as we should.

However this "we will make magic" rapid change **** doesn't work. It never works, without armed conflict to destroy previous systems to back it up, and even then you usually get gradual change anyways.

So, in all seriousness: tell me how you make this stop, without sounding like small children and depending on small children's motives.

I don't think there's anything controversial in saying that when dealing with present problems thought can become too deeply wedded to the status quo to consider ideas that may seem radical or idealistic when they may turn out to be be very practical when applied with enough imagination and foresight. That's all that he said. Yeesh.

[NGTM-1R]

I don't think there's anything controversial in saying that when dealing with present problems thought can become too deeply wedded to the status quo to consider ideas that may seem radical or idealistic when they may turn out to be be very practical when applied with enough imagination and foresight. That's all that he said. Yeesh.

It's not what he said, but what he said it in response to, that makes it stupid.

Or you could ignore context, I guess.

[Mr. Vega]

Just because some government waste is inevitable does not mean that systemic improvements reducing it can no longer be made. Yes, the way they put it was pretty idealistic, but they're not completely full of it.

[Grizzly]

In the US' case, There's always some room for improvement.