The FBI has been slammed for wasting over $10m (£5.8m)
on "questionable contractor costs" and another $7.6m on missing
equipment.
In a report, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has
criticised a number of FBI "weaknesses" in its financial dealings
with contractors.
These include incorrect overtime payments, potentially inflated
wages, and excessive and first-class airfare costs.
In one example covered in the report, Computer Sciences
Corporation (CSC), an FBI sub-contractor, charged the bureau over
$456,000 for services described only as "other direct costs."
The GAO said that, after an inquiry it was found that CSC may
not have had enough information to approve the charge, but billed
it to the FBI anyway.
Another contractor, CACI, hired to do training for the FBI,
billed the agency $50,000 to cover the cost of custom-made
highlighters and pens.
The GAO also criticised billed air travel costs.
Government employees and contractors are supposed to fly
economy, unless special permission is given. But the GAO found 19
first-class tickets that cost more than $20,000, and 75 "unusually
expensive" economy tickets costing more than $100,000 collectively,
that could not be justified by either the FBI or contractor
CSC.
The FBI is also said to have lost 1,200 pieces of equipment,
including desktop and laptop PCs, printers and servers.
The GAO said there was an over-reliance on contractors to keep
adequate records of equipment used. It said the FBI should adopt
better record keeping for equipment and pay closer attention to
contractor expenses billed.
Responding to the criticism, the FBI said it accepted the GAO’s
recommendations and that it had “accounted for” 1,000 of the
missing items.
The expenses highlighted by the GAO cover a period when the FBI
was going through a wide-scale IT infrastructure upgrade.
The FBI completed the building of a new IT infrastructure in
2004, but it failed to deliver a planned new case management system
for investigations, after a previously adopted system hit
problems.
The FBI last week said the main contract for a new $425m case
management system, known as Sentinel, had been awarded to Lockheed
Martin.