U.S. Government Crippled by Sex, Gaming Sites

BobB writes "The U.S. Department of the Interior's inspector general has released a report that says department employees are wasting their taxpayer-funded work time going to prohibited web sites. Some of these sites relate to sex, computer games, gambling and auctions. The study found that almost $2 billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences.'" From the article: "Computer-use logs revealed more than 4,732 entries relating to sexually explicit Web sites and gambling sites. Some computers accessed sex sites for 30 to 60 minutes during the test period. More than 1 million log entries were discovered indicating 7,763 Department computer users spent 2,004-plus hours accessing game and auction sites. Extrapolated over the year, that could account for 100,000 lost work hours. Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites."

Comments

I would want more information.

[gurps_npc]

For example, what did they consider "working hours". There is a HUGE difference between doing things during 9am-12pm and from 1PM-5PM as opposed to things being done during 12-1PM or from 5PM-10PM.

I know LOTS of people that use their lunch hour to surf the net or stay late and play video games after 5PM. I don't consider that unethical.

Similarly, I don't think it is wrong to spend 15 minutes checking out an ebay auction or reading your personal email, while some addict goes outside and smokes a ciggarette/takes a coffee break.

Without more information, this looks like a rabble rousing report instead of something usefull.

Re:Who's doing it, tho?

[UbuntuDupe]

I've never understood that. Even accepting that he's going to goof off on his computer, and that he wants to goof off that way, what would compel him to do it there? Can he really not wait till he gets home for that kind of thing? And to answer the obvious objection -- yes, employees typically goof off, but not at sites that could get them prosecuted. Can't he distract himself at /. or something until quittin' time?

Re:Hmmm

[Dare nMc]

2000 hours /week spread over 7800 employees.
so 30 minutes a week???? sounds like someone is wasting time, the ones who composed this report.

i hope there is no "blame the internet" bs

[circletimessquare]

i'm certain that before the www there was just as much time wasting going on on just as many useless pursuits (cards, crossword puzzles, etc). if you have a job to do, and it doesn't get done, someone notices. but if you have downtime, which frequently happens in any large bureacracy, you waste your time with pointless pursuits. true in 1806, true in 2006

it's just that logfiles make it easy to actually quantify this lost productivity for the first time. but in fact, one could make the case that the internet allows users to waste their time more... um... efficiently (snicker)

Those are some high paid 50 people!

[RingDev]

The study found that almost $2 Billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences'.... Put another way, this would equal 50 full-time employees doing nothing but surfing online game and auction sites.

I didn't RTFA, but this would imply that those 50 full time employees have a bill + production rate of $40,000,000/year. Or roughly $20,000 dollars an hour. Unless the 50 employees they are talking about are lobbyist, I just don't see this as accurate.

-Rick

Productivity?

[Tackhead]

> "The study found that almost $2 Billion a year in productivity was being lost to these 'excessive indulgences'"
>
> How fast does $2 Billion get used in Iraq? I'm all for efficiency, but lets have it across the board.

A better question: What economic output are these DOI employees (and for that matter, our mercenaries working for private contractors at 5-10 times the expense of an enlisted serviceman/woman) supposed to be creating that's worth $2B per year? In order to speak meaningfully of productivity, one first must be in the business of producing stuff.

This is government work. Nothing's being produced, only consumed.

Mod parent up!

[khasim]

Total all the "hours" spent surfing junk sites ... for 100,000 employees ... and even at 6 minutes a day you'd have 600,000 minutes = 10,000 hours = 416 hours = 52 employees working 8 hour shifts.

Now, for 50,000 employees, they'd have to spend 12 minutes out of an 8 hour day to get those numbers.

25,000 employees would require 24 minutes out of an 8 hour day.

And so forth. These "statistics" are meaningless without knowing how many TOTAL employees there are and what the mean and median are. Are there 10,000 employees and 5 of them spend 10 hours a day surfing junk while everyone thinks they're working? And the rest of the "hours" are people surfing junk sites during lunch?

Re:But out of how many? And where are they

[WillAffleckUW]

You have to wonder if some are park rangers, kind of lonely (sex sites), who like to play poker over the net since the next human is 500 miles away.

Ah, bet you forgot that they're part of the Department of the Interior, didn't you?

Rational analysis

[fermion]

This truly sucks for the US government that a few employees, taking short breaks, can cripple the government. The threat is obviously not from outside terrorists, but from the employees going to ebay during their lunch breaks. If our government is so fragile, we should indeed be afraid.

Lets look at the numbers. Over a week they counted about 7,000 employees going to illicit sites. This represents about than 1% of the 70,000 employees of the DOI. Furthermore they found that these employees spent 2000 hours on these illicit sites, or perhaps 15 minutes a day during the test week.

From these stated fact, they found three interesting things. First, the wasted time represented 50 employees, or less than 0.1% of the workforce. Second they found that the internet use represented about 24 hours of internet use, presumable bandwidth. They then took this 24 hour number and, presumable, combined it with the total budget of the DOI, 10.4 billion, realized that 24 hours was one fifth of a week, and came up with 2 billion dollars in loss.

So here is what we have. 1% of the employees, wasting 0.1% of the potential productive time of the DOI, uses 20% of the budget. This result does not indicate a problem with the employees, but a fundamental issue with the process of budgeting and managing money. Any structure that exposes 20% of the budget to risk due to the actions of 1% of the employees is surely inadequate.

Now, the article did state that 'some' computers were accessing sites that would normally be considered uncool for work, and certainly those few people at those 'some' computer can be handled by management, unless those people are themselves high ranking officials that cannot be easily reprimanded. One wonders why those 'some' computers are even allowed to go to those sites.

In the end it shows the lack of logical skills possessed by the average reporter, and, i fear, by posting it on /., the lack of logic skills of the average geek..

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's even less time than that (unless an hour suddenly became 100 minutes). 2000 hours divided among 7800 employees yields ~.25 hours per employee per week. So, each employee averages about 15 minutes slacking per week, or 3 minutes per day. They must slack in other ways because that's incredibly low.

Re:A common problem

[megaditto]

Let me guess, you are no longer in IT because you illegally spied on people instead of doing your fucking job?

You know, small things like deploying antiviruses, re-imaging the hard-disks, firewalling known threats, whatever the hell the good amins are supposed to do?

Self-righteous assholes like you give the rest of the I.T. folks an (undeserved) bad rep.