Government waste 101

My company does business with the federal government, and we know all about the unbelievable waste. Here’s an example – I called the Federal Support Desk about a failed conversion of what are known as “CCR” records to the new “SAM” format. No, I won’t bore you with the distracting details.

After trying to do the conversion by following the required steps and failing on this newly required conversion website, I called the FSD and spoke to Cynthia, a very pleasant rep. After 20 minutes, she couldn’t resolve the problem, gave me an incident number while she pushed the problem to “level 2.”

When she gave me the support ID, Account Migration Assistance/ Legacy System Account Error [Incident: 121214-000335] I could immediately tell that the system was broken, and that taxpayers were footing the bill for sloppily written software obtained from a very large U.S. computer company that the procurement agency had (in its lack of wisdom) bought.

It was obvious that 121214-000335 meant today’s date, followed by the incident number at about 11am, EST. It meant that the group has fielded 355 calls about the broken website within a few hours of the business day.

I estimated that they were taking about 1,000 calls a day. Assuming that each rep. handled an average of four calls an hour (mine was over 20 minutes) and that they make ~$50,000 a year, or ~$25 a hour, the support costs to the taxpayers was over $1,500,000 a year excluding benefits as 1,000 calls a day requires about 30 agents to handle the repetitive calls!

This is why we’re in serious trouble. A defective piece of software that the government probably paid $25,000 for, is costing the taxpayer’s $1 1/2 million a year to support it.

Our government can get away with this because of one reason – they can keep printing dollars to pay for everything. How? Because we control the world’s reserve currency. When that ends, we’ll be in deep, deep trouble as our entire system is built on spending more than we take in. Be hopeful that it will never end, or that you’ll be long gone before the music stops. It will be a very painful experience.