In this weeks news, we get public admission from government contractors that “business is bad”…due to DOGE. Accenture, BoozAllen, CACI and others have made earnings warnings, due to cancelled, expired and suspended government contracts. It is about time! Back in 2011, I had deep knowledge of a multi year, multi billion dollar fraud at the Department of Defense. The facts I had in my possession got the attention of Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.
A medical doctor by training, “Doctor Tom” knew full well that our government was in a Tom Clancy kind of moment. The “Clear and Present Danger” to our fiscal lives had arrived. At one time, most Americans knew the term “Pirates of the Potomac” could apply either to Defense Contractors or to Congress. But a new Pirate sailed into town in the 1990’s and early 2000’s. “White Shoe” CPA firms had consolidated to the Big Four. I won’t name them because I have a family…more on that later. But the Big Four CPA firms also had “sister companies” in the consulting field. And when I was coming out of Wharton’s MBA program, I even interviewed with a few of them.
I would end up recruiting IT talents for three of the Big Four on a contract basis…which is why I knew about the DoD fraud. Simply put, the government consulting firms are governed by by-laws that require they offer the U.S. government the very best hourly rate for work conducted on government contracts. This demanded the contractors would charge no more than a defined small percentage as profit on top of their own costs. But given the “back scratch” and “revolving door” of all things Washington, DC…such bi-laws were simply not followed. After all if a Prime Contractor can charge $400 an hour for a consultants time, and pay the consultant $150 an hour…and pocket the $250 an hour for themselves and their share holders, that is just what the CEO is charged to do…for his share holders. And where does that leave the tax payer? So this is why Tom Coburn called me into his office.
Every year, Doctor Tom would publish a report about government spending. He did not give it a “pithy name” as Rand Paul has done. Tom simply called it the “Waste, Fraud and Abuse Report.” Every year, “pearls of pain” would be slowly leaked by Tom’s office to the Press in 2011. Today, DOGE is doing it’s level best to post the “dollar discovery” on it’s website. There is growing sentiment in the Press that DOGE is not being accurate with all of their figures. That would not surprise me. For a few computer talents to discover “some fraud” and call it out is no surprise to me. For a few computer talents to discover ALL OF THE FRAUD…that would be a revelation, that could lead to a REVOLUTION. That ofcourse would be no small feat, but that is exactly what Tom Coburn and I wanted to do back in 2011. So…what happened?
Doctor Tom thought I should bring my eighteen panel power point presentation to his office and make the pitch to the General Accouting Office team that was responsible for the audit of the DoD suspect/fraud contract. The particular fraud was on two pages of Tom’s fourteen inch thick, double space, 12 PICA, double sided report. I always thought that the Press should actually see the physical report…as it resembles the report from the Warren Commission or the 9/11 Commission in size and scope. In other words, the annual waste fraud and abuse in our government was EPIC, is EPIC and will forever be EPIC if something dramatic is not done to change our body politic.
If both the GOP and DNC have an “inclination” or an actual plan to divert tax dollars to their particular causes, family and friends, does our country need a viable THIRD PARTY? Probably. But if national elections are still controlled by local political parties, states like Pennsylvania will usually go blue…simply because the DNC controls most of the states votes in places like Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. And if you know anything about those cities, you know that the returns for the two Obama elections were laughable and not rooted in reality.
Everyone in Pennsylvania knows the DNC in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia collects the votes and counts the votes. So much so, that TEAM TRUMP was not allowed anywhere near the election officials who counted the votes in 2020. That ofcourse is another topic for another day. Back to my power point.
So the GAO team strolls into Sen. Coburn conference room. One woman and three men. The Director of the team was a forty-something East Indian with an accent. He did not appear to be an American which raised my curiousity. More on that later.
I detailed the fraud in a typical Wharton MBA power point presentation. The last panel was the “kicker.” I listed the primes, the sub primes and the sub-sub primes who were working on the DOD IT contract …that I represented as FRAUD. Each of the contractors had dates, fraud convictions and fines paid over the past fifteen years of their contract lives in Washington, DC. With this panel and my comments, the Director turned to his team, nodded and signaled for them to leave the room…without a word, without a comment, without a question.
There will be no Q&A, typical of such a presentation. Instead, the Director of the audit team stopped at the door, turned and clearly stated, “none of those contractors have committed fraud.” This was stunning! I said, “these are not MY FACTS. These dates, finding of fraud and fines are from the Department of Justice website.” Despite my response, he said nothing, turned and walked out of the room, the office and the building. So…while all of that sounds like the start of a “corruption movie,”…(i.e. “Fair Game” the Valerie Plame Wilson story is streaming now), over the next two days, I made sure I was not going to become such a story.
Seth Rich, rumored to be the twenty-something DNC staffer who leaked Hillary and John Podesta’s emails to Wikileaks, which could easily have swung uncommitted voters to Trump in 2016, never made it home one night. He was killed on a leafy D.C. street. His cell phone and his wallet were recoverd at the scene…so it was no robbery. Such a murder is conducted to send a message. To think otherwise is simply niave. But that happened five years after my briefing with the GAO. Still, my spidey sense was tingling.
The next day, I took a deep dive on the GAO Director. Who was this foreign national now working in a senior GS 16 position at the GAO? Well, there he was…right on LinkedIn. (Thank you to the Wharton Alum who came up with that App). The Director had studied at an Indian University and his previous employment was with a Big Four firm in London…the same Big Four firm that had their consulting arm as a Sub Prime on the aforementioned suspect DoD contract that was over budget, over due and by my definition, was a fraud. So…had the Big Four firm dropped an agent into the GAO, so the DOD contract would not be found out as a fraud?
How many of you remember ENRON? When that house of cards fell, the Andersen CPA firm that verified the financials of ENRON dissolved over night. Thousands of CPAs all around the United States were out of business. Andersen’s consulting arm had to rebrand, which is one of the companies this week that announced DOGE driven earnings warnings….Accenture. This all begs a very big question. One that demands it’s own line and enhanced PICA.
“How many Ghosts are in the Machine?” BOLD 16 PICA.
A simple question. A managing director in London makes around $350,000 U.S. equivalent. So why take a job in steamy D.C. for $165,000 (GS 16 money in 2011)? Who would do that? So, Donald, Elon…do us all a favor, and conduct an audit of the GAO.
AUDIT THE AUDITORS. And after you do that, revisit the simple strategy that Tom Coburn and I came up with to balance the budget:
Release redundant consultants 1.25M x $400/hr x 2,000 hrs/yr
Re-hat to GS required consultants 1.25M x $315/hr x 2,000 hrs/yr
Retire and not rehire GS 80,000/yr x $85/hr x 2,000 hrs/yr
Fire all Obama hires 1.2M x $85/hr x 2,000 hrs/yr.
Do the math and you get right around $1.0 TRILLION.
Oh yeah, facing re-election, and inheriting the 2008 financial crisis, Obama’s first six months in office, he saw “job shedding” of right around 500,000 per month. To combat losses in the private sector, Obama added 1.2 million “loyalists” to his government. He borrowed $1.2 TRILLION to do it. This news didn’t make the Post or the Times or the Journal but it is true nonetheless. I have the spreadsheets from Office of Personnel Management and Bureau of Labor Statistics to prove it.
Elon, Donald…you were both Wharton undergrads. Did this Wharton MBA explain this well enough to you? Oh yeah, almost forgot.
The day after I discovered the GAO Director could be an “agent” of the sub-prime, I was offered exactly what I wanted! Out of the blue, I got a call from one of the aforementioned companies, offering me a “Independent Validation and Verification” contract to provide oversight on government IT contracts. I asked if it was at the Naval Supply Command in Norfolk, VA. Nope. I was going to …wait for it, Baghdad! I asked, “Do I get a security team?”
You know the answer!
I had “kicked the hornets nest.” Which is why I hope those DOGE twenty-somethings get some security and soon. I doubt any of them know who Seth Rich was. They were all in Middle School when he was gunned down in the street.
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