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US State Dept. Loses Anti-Terrorist Program Laptops
Stony Stevenson writes "It has surfaced that the US State Department can't account for up to about 1,000 laptops, perhaps as many as 400 of which belonged to the department's Anti-Terrorism Assistance Program. Internal auditors found that the department lost track of $30 million worth of computer equipment, 'the vast majority of which... perhaps as much as 99 percent,' were laptops, according to one official. Another official calculated that the average State Department laptop costs US$3,000 and figured that meant as many as 1,000 laptops might be astray — not 10,000 laptops as the US$30 million figure suggests. They're obviously not very good at maths."
They were probably Dell D6X0 series laptops with encrypted hard drives. Getting a basic one right now (1GB RAM, 1.73GHz Dual-Core Processor, Encrypted Hard Drive) _would_ cost me about $1,100 if I could buy direct from Dell, but thanks to 8(a) contract purchasing obligation, it'd run me over $2,500 from the reseller (who adds zero benefit). Aren't you glad we're supporting small, disadvantaged, minority, woman-owned businesses at the cost of your (and my) tax dollars?
Large organisations like to restrict the numbers of their suppliers as far as possible, this means there is little or no competition for vendors, who are then able to charge as they like.
I don't know which MBA came up with that concept, but there you go.
Deleted
Don't forget warranties and service contracts and markups from resellers... it's easy to tip $3k a laptop if you try.
I presume that price includes software, created by government contractors at high price for a specific purpose, divided amongst the few thousand computers that have it installed.
Software would be a part of the purchase price, but not the calculation of the value of the lost property.
After all, software is licensed not bought. When a computer gets lost, they still have the license, right? It's not like they have repurchase the same software for the replacement computers.
I work as a scientist for a US-government research lab.
Where I work, we have an elaborate tracking system. Every piece of equipment has an inventory number and a barcode. We have to reconcile the inventory at least yearly, which involves people walking around and scanning in each item. Any missing items (or even relocated items) have to be found. There is a special procedure for throwing out any tracked item. The whole system is actually a bit of a pain, but stories like this make me realize why these inventory systems are necessary (especially when using taxpayer money).
I'm assuming that this inventory tracking is a government-wide rule. In which case, only massive incompetence or corruption would enable someone to misplace millions of dollars of equipment. Where I work, the tracking is very diligent, and misplacing even a single computer is a "big deal" and involves mass-emailing, checking records, and tracking until the asset is recovered.
So, there *should* be a very clear paper-trail to figure out where these items last were, and who was responsible for tracking them. But of course, some agencies actually follow the rules, whereas (apparently) others do not.
"No (non-gaming) laptop costs that much unless you're just trying to burn money."
Itronix and Panasonic semi-rugged and rugged units routinely cost far more than that.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
The $30M number is bogus, it includes a lot of other stuff.
This whole article is sourced from a blog called "Dead Men Working" which is focused on venting the frustrations diplomatic foreign service officers about their problems with getting security clearance from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security; coincidentally the group alleged to have lost the laptops. So take the article with a grain of salt.
Also, the blog reported yesterday that the laptops were all found and accounted for. So, really, nothing to see here.
The "Dead Men Working" blog is really interesting reading though. http://www.deadmenworking.blogspot.com/
To quote from their PR materials: Lockheed Martin is the largest provider of IT services, systems integration, and training to the U.S. Government. [...] with approximately $21.4 billion in 2007 sales.
"Maths" is a perfectly acceptable abbreviation of "mathematics"... And, in fact, is more common in certain parts of the English-speaking world than "math".
Excelent, Socialism by Ludwig von Mises is now #2 on a google search for "socialism." It's the book that converted previous liberal democrats like Hayak to free markets. I bet you would have even less faith in government if you read through that.
The Navy pays Northrup Grumman (through subcontractor EDS) $3,000 per year to LEASE crappy Dell Laptops.
http://www.eds.com/sites/nmci/
You'd think that this would come with a certain amount of priced-in tech support, but that all costs extra, too. The whole system is a giant POS that doesn't do what the Navy really needs and still costs the taxpayers three times what it would be worth even if it did work right. Government contracts being what they are, I'd imagine that any other federal agency would pay similarly inflated prices.
And as for ten-year-old laptops, while it's true that their net book value should be zero (cost less accumulated depreciation), those are recorded separately on the books. So until you retire an asset, the full cost is on your books -- even if its offset by accumulated depreciation.
If the assets are no longer in service, they need to be retired -- this reverses both your original asset entry and the total of your accumulated depreciation for the assets.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Somewhere along the line there is going to be a break in accountability and sooner or later, if you signed for 100 laptops, you had better be able to produce 100 laptops or 100 signatures on equipment issue receipts. If you can't your going to pay for the shortage and if your lucky they'll be able to depreciate them down but 10 cents on the dollar can really add up.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
At least according to this website: http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002717866
A state department laptop costs an average of $3000? That's completely insane! No (non-gaming) laptop costs that much unless you're just trying to burn money.
Ok, buy a laptop. Put the most popular business OS on it. Put the most popular business office suite on it. Put "standard" software on it, Acrobat, virus scanner, CALs for email, SQL, and such. Now look at the cost. Having bought a number of computers for companies, the hardware costs $500-$1000 for the desktop, and $2000+ after all the software. And yes, they essentially throw out all the licenses when they get rid of the computer, but by then the software is usally obsolete as well. Not to mention that a laptop order here is usually for someone "special" with special needs. With the cost of the one laptop was an extra battery, an extra charger, a monitor, a stand, a dock, a case, a mouse, a keyboard (invariably wireless) and sometimes even things like printers. The "laptop" was half accessories or more.
So when they "cost" $3000, that's probably not the cost of the hardware laptop only, but includes other expenses.
Learn to love Alaska
Er, no. Not quite. They should have a value that's written-down across years like vehicles. But that's a "should" and often doesn't get taken care of until you do a big inventory showing loss like this one. The next released figures will show a huge percentage of "found" laptops that are actually written off this way. A portion of that will be legitimate ("/That/ old Thinkpad? I tossed it years ago.") and a portion will be coverup to deal with this embarassing headline.
Unless there's a reason to suspect that there is important information on the laptop, I'm sure that all laptops past their retirement age that are unaccounted for will be retired. That may not be GAAP, but it's SOP. If it's worth nothing on the books (while simultaneously being worth full purchase price because it hasn't been retired) and can't be located, it will be retired and that will fix most of the problems. What happens is that the people that keep the books on inventory are rarely told when something is disposed of, even when they should be (we used to track monitors and personal ink/bubble-jet printers, but now don't, so many people disposed of the disposable printers and crappy 15" CRTs as if they weren't tracked assetts, since new ones are no longer tracked, but if they were put in the books before that decision, then they still needed to be tracked until retired).
I guess the short answer is that people complain that the government isn't run like a real corporation, but things like this just remind me that it is run just like a real corporation. The level of laziness and apathy is not any different. Now, let me get back to reading slashdot at work.
Learn to love Alaska
Right, and "just let private corporations handle it" will be better?
You think corporate employees don't get their jobs through friends and family or cronyism? There are efficient government run systems.
The problem is not "because it is done by government". It all depends on the people you have, it doesn't matter if it's "private or gov". Some stuff governments just do better than private corps. The idea is governments try not to do too much stuff that they're not good at, and regulate the private corps (especially the monopolies). And the government is accountable to the people.
The problem is you have a corrupt government and most voters don't really care that much. Whereas the private corporations care, and so they finance the politicians they want in both parties.
I've heard cases where people end up regulating/approving stuff made by a company they were/are linked to.
Anyway, it does look like the US voters are happy enough with the situation, otherwise they could get together and vote for someone really different for a change. Yes the 1st past the post thing tends to make things degenerate to a two horse race, but if you all are really pissed off enough with those two parties then you should start getting organized to vote some other candidate instead.
In the recent elections in my country, in one constituency when an opposition party member was disqualified and had to drop out, the voters voted in an independent instead of the incumbent.