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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."
1) They've only done one pass of their inventory. Once this has become public, the supervisors will get pushed on from their bosses to make sure that more equipment is accounted for in the second and third passes.
2) The reason that many of these laptops are listed as worth ~$3,000 is probably that some of them are 10+ years old (when laptops were really really expensive). That also explains why some of them can't be found; they're shoved in the back of filing cabinets or in the bottom of desk-drawers because they haven't been used in years and years. Their practical value is probably nothing, but -- on paper -- they're worth thousands because that's what they were bought for all those years ago...
I haven't worked for the government ever asides from working as an intern for a local County government's IT department, so I really don't know the answer to this.
What in the world happens with these things as far as papertrails go? This question comes to mind every time they "lose" weapons or laptops. Isn't there anyone that has their name on these items as being responsible? Surely either the shipping departments, the departments that they were assigned to, or the people that they were assigned to could be held responsible right?
I imagine for example that in moving of large arms shipments around the Middle East for our troops that there's someone always in charge of the stuff, or that last touched it. Wouldn't a great place to start (and place the blame) be the last person that signed off on something like this? In anything bigger than a really tiny company, there should be very clear paper trails like this right?
Doesn't someone have to answer? Isn't it the auditors job to know who last touched them?
Tibbon
tibbon.com
If you got all of your money by stealing it from people, I don't think you would care too much about wasting some of that money.
In government, where is the incentive to not waste money?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Aren't you glad we're supporting small, disadvantaged, minority, woman-owned businesses at the cost of your (and my) tax dollars?
Yep sounds like my old company of 20 people doing contracts for the government. The President and VP co owned the company... guess who was the president: the minority woman. Guess who did most of the contact establishment, contract negotiation, and assembled the technical know how, and basically ran the company... the white bread male VP. She was useless, and started to get bitter when she began to realize this. Not saying this is a reflection of her nationality or sex, just that she was nothing more than a figurehead for the company so we could get more contracts.
Actually these were special DHS laptops with the ultimate security feature:
An ultraslick teflon outer coating to prevent the employees from writing down their automatically generated 16 letter+capital+number+special changing once a month passwords on sticky notes and glue them to the notebook.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
As a scientist working for a US-government research lab, these stories make me die a bit inside.
Where I work, we are very budget conscious. We could never justify spending $3000 on laptops. In fact we have to make a very solid case before we can get our desktops upgraded to even modern commodity levels (despite the fact that, as you might guess, we do plenty of work that pushes a desktop machine to its limits). Moreover, we have a very strict inventory system. All equipment (including computers) is accounted for, and has to be barcode-scanned annually to make sure it's still accounted for. Even computers that are so old no one would want them are still meticulously tracked.
I always assumed that this was standard for government agencies... but I guess some agencies are able to bend and break these rules more wantonly than others. It makes me sad to think of the wastage in one branch when we are diligently following the rules, and barely scraping by, in another...
The DHS machines aren't any better than yours. I seriously doubt the laptops cost the government more than the roughly $1000 you would normally expect them to pay. The additional money actually goes to fund operations and projects which are kept off the books. It's the same with the $300 hammer or $10k toilet seats for the military. They pay the same price you do, and the extra money goes to "black ops". Special Forces operations in foreign countries, counter-terrorist measures, anything that has to be funded but can't show up on the very public Federal Budget without compromising security. So yes, the budget shows them to be $3k, but two-thirds of that money actually went someplace other than computers.
I was more outraged at the $3k per laptop cost. Who in their right mind would spend that much on a notebook...eh.. nevermind.