Bilking the government (and the tax payer) is a problem as old as the revolution. By happenstance, HLN is running a story today about a contractor over billing its services to the military in Afghanistan. Just how much of this chicanery is apathetic ineptness or intentional fraud or the fault of employees or subcontractors is not clear.

Federal auditors seem to be getting better at monitoring and scrutinizing the books over the years and at recovering over payments, if that's a consolation.

refi:  We're subsidizing the planting of food instead of poppies in Afghanistan.  I wonder how that's going to work for them.  Do we really think we're going to completely wipe out poppies so the Afghanis will plant, instead, corn or wheat or some other strange crop?  Really. 

What the news media needs to do is follow the money. Find all those contractors who sold programs, equipment, systems or even just ideas to the federal government, and follow the money. Nine times out of ten, they'll find the contractor or company has a connection to some former federal official or politician. Those people leave federal jobs from high level SES positions and go into the "private sector", which means, they work for people who sell stupid, worthless crap to the federal government. They know the system. They can use former employees and contacts to get their program, system, idea...whatever, sold to some agency. It happens every day. They switch from one stupid, worthless computer system for something, to an equally worthless system every other year or so, costing us billions in lost productivity.

It's all about the contractors. They are sucking down tax dollars by the billions. The IRS even uses contractors to come after you for your tax money, and they don't have to follow the same rules as the government employed IRS agent does.

 Here is another one for ya REFI: 

Commercial lending giant CIT files bankruptcy

Government(?) (more like the taxpayers!) to likely lose $2.3 billion it spent to prop company up last year