Company paid twice for war support work

Source: AP

WASHINGTON - A defense contractor hired to repair combat equipment routinely failed to do the job right and then charged the government millions of dollars for the extra work needed to get the gear ready for battle in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a newly released audit.

Overall, the contractor's employees at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait worked about 188,000 additional hours to fix Humvees, heavy transporters and fighting vehicles that allegedly were mended but flunked a military inspection, the Government Accountability Office said.

The GAO estimates the Army paid $4.2 million for the additional labor. Under the terms of the $581 million contract, the company is to be paid for all maintenance hours worked. That includes "labor hours associated with maintenance performed after the Army rejects equipment that fails to meet Army maintenance standards," said the GAO, which is the investigative arm of Congress.

The contractor is not named in the GAO audit. The contract number is, however. The Federal Procurement Data System, a Web site that tracks government contracts, shows ITT Federal Services International of Colorado Springs, Colo., as the company performing the work.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080124/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/iraq_contracts

As usual. What a bunch of skeezebags...

Ugh, the things you can get away with in government...

...to some of the other shit we hear about. Hammers, toilet seats, radio crystals. Contracts/projects into the hundreds of millions that are paid out/abandoned because a new bum is warming a departmental head's seat.

Is this particular instance actually worth even a moment's outrage?

(edit coz clumsy fingers ate my subject.)

They're counting on that.

This is the crap they troll in front of us, so we look like bloody idiots when it turns out to be someone's son/nephew being a run of the mill incompetent.

The simple fact that this is under investigation at all strongly suggests that for once this really is a case of "Nothing to see here." It's a pretty fair bet, that this will come down to that son/nephew or a lone wolf manager "with his hand in the till".

I save my outrage for when it's when $100 million get pissed up against the wall because there's a new head of department and he shitcans a project so as to hand the whole thing over to a different contractor to do over from scratch everything that's already been done.

Not that it does much good, "Parameters/requirements have changed." is a marvelously vague reason for a lot of things.

Proportionately that would be well over $1 billion sacrificed on the alter of cronyism for you lot.

are going hungry? How many are dying because they don't have healthcare? How many are living outdoors or in their cars?

This money should be spent on those people. Not handed over to lying thieves.

...relative failing to do his job right.

Now, odds are that the job done for the original $400M plus would cost as little as half that or less in the real world. Just as virtually any other defense project probably would too. And Joe Public will never know, because his eyes glaze over when you mention numbers like that. $4M on the other hand is a lot of money.

Spending too much effort on this, is scrabbling on the floor for loose change whilst a passenger in a car being driven off a cliff.

"Recovering" $4M at a time is how to kill bodies like NASA, Social Security and what passes for socialised medicine in your country.