Well, that solves your problem, Rachel.

After you walk your dogs, mail the turds you collected to the Pentagon. Send the Defense Department a bill for $100,000 per turd. Mark it "priority".

You can now retire and let Sunny and Digger support you.

Man can you imagine how much worse it might have been if they were shipping hammers and toilet seats instead of just screws and washers?

Have fun ;)!

Holy ship!!!

Will the twins have all their bank accounts and property returned to the rightful owners?

In fact, yes, tedders. The government has seized all their cars and vacation homes and bank accounts and will sell them to recoup as much of the money as they can.

And remember, folks, this lack of bureaucratic oversight sure seems bad in this circumstance. But would you rather read a story that begins: "Soldier killed in Iraq after equipment breaks; two 19 cent washers failed because a bureaucrat in Boise delayed approval of priority shipping costs."?

As a government employee myself, I can tell you that it's not easy setting the proper balance between getting things done and imposing proper oversight. The public gets hot under the collar if you get too lenient or too strict.

You complain when the post office or the IRS takes weeks to do anything for you, right? And you wish it would move "at the speed of business"? Well, moving at the speed of business occasionally allows for bad guys to take advantage of the system. Let's keep the shame on the crooks, where it belongs.

Heck no, I don't complain when the government departments that are created just to take money from my pocket - like the IRS - are slow. Me, I'm a FairTax advocate ... put all those government "workers" back on welfare or make them get real jobs.
It's funny that you chose to mention departments that are supposed to SERVE the public.
Out here in the real world, our jobs - when they involve logistics - actually REQWUIRE us to do our jobs and make sure we're not paying $100 to send $1 items. That's because we're expected to treat the companies money like it's ours and there IS a limit. I realize this is different than a job where you care less about the publics money, since there's no end to it.
In this case, I see two lots of bad guys ... the crooks, and the incompetant morons that set up the automated approval system without proper checks.
It's too bad that there are no standards for government workers.
Kind of reminds you of the massive amount of credit card abuse in government ... because it's just too much work to have checks, balances and approvals ... like we have out here in "no free money" land.

Keep in mind that just like the real work-a-day world, the government has a nice big group of people who do good job and really are honorable people. They of course never get heard about, because the freaking a--holes are the only ones that are news worthy. Like PatHMV said, lets remember who the crooks are. I would bet this leads to a remedy of the faulty system also.

Every day, real businesses make process decisions to balance risk of loss and inconvenience / delay to customers. Put some high-theft items behind locked glass doors, and you reduce shoplifting of those items, but also reduce sales to impulse buyers. Some internet sales companies I know go to greater lengths to protect against fraud by requiring you to fax them a copy of your credit card or license before authorizing a high-dollar sale. That ticks off some people who don't appreciate having their honesty questioned.

Or take expense accounts. Scrutinize expense accounts TOO closely, and morale drops because employees think management is a bunch of penny-pinchers who don't trust them. Scrutinize them too little, and soon the company will be paying for porn rentals, hookers, and 5 star hotels. Finding the balance is tough, for any organization.

When a business is defrauded or loses money from doing this balancing process poorly, few people hear about it or care, because it's the company's money... even if the real result is that we must pay higher prices for those decisions. But when the government's involved, EVERYBODY notices... it's news.

Which is fine, it's taxpayer money and government employees ultimately exist to serve the average citizen. But that doesn't mean that government waste is necessarily all that more prevalent... you just hear about it more.

As an example of this point, consider the myth of "going postal." We've all heard about postal workers going crazy and shooting up the post office. There are even video games making fun of this phenomenon. But in reality, postal workers are only about 1/3 as likely to be killed at work as the rest of the workforce in the U.S. In fact, the rate is much, much lower than similar jobs. Postal workers are killed in the workplace at a rate of about .26 per 100,000 employees. By contrast, supervisors/proprietors of sales and sales clerks are killed in the workplace at a rate of 3.1 per 100,000. But there are no jokes about salesmen being gunned down by disgruntled coworkers.

Waste, fraud, and abuse go on everywhere. We just hear about it more when it's the government.

I respect what you are saying PatHMV, but there is a rather significant differnce between what goes on in a corporation and what goes on in government.

When a corporation screws up and that screw up costs that corporation a boatload of money, the only losers are the corporation itself, and perhaps it's stock holders, but they knew the risks going in. When the government screws up and loses a boatload of money foolishly, that money that was foolishly lost is coming out of the pockets of hard working tax payers like you and I, and if the loss is indeed bad enough or there are enough of them, that same government makes no bones about coming around asking for even more money to make up for it. Either that, or someone else suffers for the mistake the lack of money creates, because program funding start getting cut to make up the deficit. Pretty big difference if you ask me.

The reason that Government screw ups are more newsworthy than Corporate screw ups, and hence why we hear about them more frequently, is because the Government is supposed to be a not for profit organization, and has a helluva lot more stockholders (namely the entire US citizenry)than your average corporation, so that kind of makes it a much bigger deal to the people involved, and they certainly have a right to know.

Have fun ;)!

All correct, Brian, which is why I explicitly said that it's fine with me that government screw-ups get more attention.

But it doesn't mean that government screws up MORE than the average business. Any entity run by human beings is going to have plenty of screw ups.

And I would again point out that the other people who lose when there are corporate screw ups are its customers, who must then pay higher prices, on the whole.

Bottom line. They got caught.

How many aren't?

if this upsets you, don't look at the amount of money lost to medicare fraud. Or social security fraud. Or any of the weird things the Fed Gov "researches"...like a few years back there was a $50 million grant given to study Ketchup.

A Ketchup study may well have been relevant, or interesting, or something...but it's weird and was it so NECESSARY that we had to spend $50 million on it?