Sunday, October 23, 2005

Business as usual

From the WaPo, we get another story of corporate excellence in billing.
Federal auditors say the prime contractor on a $1 billion technology contract to improve the nation's transportation security system overbilled taxpayers for as much as 171,000 hours' worth of labor and overtime by charging up to $131 an hour for employees who were paid less than half that amount.

Three years ago, the Transportation Security Administration hired Unisys Corp. to create a state-of-the-art computer network linking thousands of federal employees at hundreds of airports to the TSA's high-tech security centers.

The project is costing more than double the anticipated amount per month, and the network is far from complete -- nearly half of the nation's airports have yet to be upgraded. Government officials said last week that the initial $1 billion contract ceiling was only a starting point for the project, which they recently said could end up costing $3 billion.
And what does Unisys have to say about this?
Conaway acknowledged that Unisys had problems with its internal financial controls. He also said that employees miscoded timesheets and that mistakes were not caught until months later because the company was pushing to meet the demands of the contract.

"Our discipline on some of our internal processes lapsed a little bit," he said.
Read the whole article, it's a doozy!

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