Free Enterprise run amok, thanks to 2 brothers!

[dogshawred]

Homemade silencers made for $8,000 sold to Navy for $1.6 million, authorities investigating
~
“Are you kidding me?” said Carlos C. Robles, the machinist who made 349 silencers for his boss at a cost of $8,000, including parts and labor, when he found out that they were sold to the Navy for $1.6 million.
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Who could blame him? Given the known facts of the situation, that’s a pretty natural response.
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See, Robles’ boss, Mark Stuart Landersman, a 52-year-old auto mechanic from Temecula, California, was awarded a handsome contract by the Navy to make silencers in Auguts 2012.
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Some may call it a stroke of luck because Landersman was facing hard times, struggling to make ends meet. Earlier that year, he and his wife declared bankruptcy. Now, the Navy was dumping $1.6 million into his lap.
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Others, however, believing that no one is that lucky, began to suspect something was up. After all, why would the Navy pay an auto mechanic such a large sum of money to make silencers?
~
Now for the rest of the story; Homemade silencers made for $8,000 sold to Navy for $1.6 million, authorities investigating

 

[sdprof]

Meanwhile, the many reputable, established companies that make suppressors, are all going, "Huh?"

 

[Warrior1256]

Business as usual (corruption, that is) with our federal government.

 

[jcreek]

Business as usual (corruption, that is) with our federal government.

You got that right. If the American people knew how wasteful the government, especially the military, really was, they'd be disgusted. The last time my unit deployed as a whole was during the surge in '03. When we were coming home, our CO at the time (we've been through several since then) didn't feel like packing up and shipping home our Base-X tents home. Keep in mind, these are the 15-20 person tents that run about 25k a pop. The Iraqi government as well as the Brits requested them. However, our CO being the moron that he was, believed that they would inevitably fall into enemy hands somehow. Instead he opted to pile all 20 or so of them up, and about 100 gallons of diesel and one spark later, they were gone.

The flaw lies in the budgeting system. The next fiscal year's budget depends entirely in how much the unit spent the previous year (with little to no oversight as to how it's spent.) It's a use it or lose it type of deal, so if at the end of the FY, the unit has lots of money left, they have to find a way to blow it so their following year's budget doesn't get cut. It's a horribly flawed system.