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GAO Sting Finds More Fake Military Parts From China
Nidi62 writes "The Government Accountability Office, through a fictitious company, recently requisitioned parts from China in order to determine if the Chinese government was living up to its promises of battling counterfeit parts. The report from the GAO found that '334 of 396 vendors who offered to sell parts to the fictitious company were from China' and that 'all 16 parts eventually purchased by the fake company came from 13 China-based vendors and all were determined by an independent testing laboratory to be counterfeit.' The parts requested were supposedly for use in F-15s, MV-22 Ospreys, and nuclear submarines, and were requested as new parts. The report (PDF) also says that in the past three years, over one million counterfeit parts came from Chinese companies. This stands in sharp contrast to the Chinese government's promise to clamp down on the production of counterfeit parts in China."
You started out right, then you ended very wrong. Tax policy in this country didn't start being a problem until we decided to go Free Market; translation, forcing US companies to compete with Chinese companies that don't give a shit about human rights, worker rights, or environmental rights. It's impossible for US companies to be competitive with a company that can dump its waste behind the factory, work its employees like slaves, and treat its citizens like government property.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
It's an election year. Politicians are currently looking for issues with legs, um, that "resonate with the voter". A good hate for China might help certain congresscritters with their primaries or a certain someone to look presidential.
You don't have to. To the contrary, checking becomes *easier* when you order a larger quantity of an item.
If you've received a million nutplates, pick 100 of them randomly, and check them thoroughly. Reject the entire shipment if any of those 100 are counterfeit.
If more than 1% of the nutplates are fake, you'd be likely to detect it, and if more than 10% of the plates are fakes, you'd be virtually guaranteed to detect it. Thus when all 100 check out as genuine, it's unlikely that there's more than a few percent fakes, tops.
At that point, it's probably not worth it to the supplier to fake the delivery. Yes they can put in 1% fakes and 99% reals, and hope that it's not detected (their odds of this are about even).
But having 50:50 odds of getting away with 1% fraud while 50% of the time your entire shipment is rejected, just isn't profitable.
In contrast, it's hard to do reasonable checking when you order a *low* count of some part, say 3.
Statistical sampling *works*. You really -can- test the quality of a million-gallon-delivery of whatever by picking a few random samples, and test those.