Lamin Darbo,
I liked your piece it was short and powerful.If politics signs the bills that pollute the air and those that cause wars etc,,,,How can the private sector ever spring without checks and balances? I wonder in my mind?

How about these private contractors here,who "duped" the US tax payers?  Should they go got scot free all because we are bored???

Hello! the civil rights movements that helped remove the "pile" of rubble on the heads of minorities could not have been done if politics was brushed off.Social science is one bloc.Lets read beyond the layer of immitations please. I liked nabuur's site anyway,however I saw a lot of politically-related stuff therein.Check the language and the run through the semantics.Well...this is why this animal called democracy is so beautiful because it drinks from the sea of IDEAS! Therefore I respect Hydara's observations but disagree with generalisations at the farthest.

Read the following piece and then see how fora like the Gambia-l,allgambian.net and gambiapost.net  are  very good conductors of news.



Contractor Accused Of Overbilling U.S.
Technology Company Hired After 9/11 Charged Too Much for Labor, Audit Says
By Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Scott Higham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, October 23, 2005; Page A01

Federal auditors say the prime contractor on a $1 billion technology contract to improve the nation's transportation security system overbilled taxpayers for as much as 171,000 hours' worth of labor and overtime by charging up to $131 an hour for employees who were paid less than half that amount.

Three years ago, the Transportation Security Administration hired Unisys Corp. to create a state-of-the-art computer network linking thousands of federal employees at hundreds of airports to the TSA's high-tech security centers.

 Transportation Security Administration officials acknowledged that, initially, they were not prepared to manage the Unisys contract but said say they have since hired more staff members and improved oversight. (By Joe Raedle -- Getty Images)


Monday, 3 p.m. ETHigh Cost of Homeland Security
Staff Writers Robert O'Harrow and Scott Higham will be online on Oct. 24 to answer reader questions about their ongoing coverage of the Dept. of Homeland Security.




TimelineLucrative Contracts, Legal Problems
Unisys Corp. has been at the center of several procurement-fraud cases over the years, two of which included allegations that the company submitted inflated labor costs on federal contracts. The following are some of those cases.




The High Price of Homeland Security
   Contractor Accused Of Overbilling U.S.
   Government Can't Explain Increase in 2002 TSA Contract
   Subcontractor's Story Details Post-9/11 Chaos
   The High Cost of a Rush to Security
   A Subcontractor's Short But Lucrative Existence
More Stories




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The project is costing more than double the anticipated amount per month, and the network is far from complete -- nearly half of the nation's airports have yet to be upgraded. Government officials said last week that the initial $1 billion contract ceiling was only a starting point for the project, which they recently said could end up costing $3 billion.

Procurement specialists said the Unisys contract illustrates the pitfalls of relying on corporations to manage ambitious homeland security contracts with little oversight from a thinly stretched federal procurement force. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, several projects have experienced similar problems with cost and performance, including efforts to hire federal airline passenger screeners and to place bomb detectors and radiation monitors at airports and seaports.

In two reviews conducted last year, federal auditors found that Unisys charged higher per-hour labor rates than were justified for lower-level employees, according to copies of the audits obtained by The Washington Post. For example, Unisys billed taxpayers $131.12 an hour for a technical writer who should have made no more than $46.43 an hour. The extra money was generally not passed along to the employees but was kept by the company.

Last spring, the auditors referred findings of "suspected irregularity" to the Office of the Inspector General at the Homeland Security Department, which includes the TSA, according to copies of the audits and referral.

The contract is under review for possible violations of the federal False Claims Act, according to documents and interviews. A spokeswoman for the inspector general's office declined to comment.

"There certainly was no attempt here to commit any type of misdeed of any form," said Tom Conaway, managing partner of homeland security for Unisys who is overseeing the contract.

Unisys of Blue Bell, Pa., inappropriately charged some of the highest rates possible under the contract by labeling lower-level employees as experts in their fields, the auditors found. Unisys said the employees' experience and responsibilities merited the higher rates.

At the same time, the auditors discovered that timesheets were repeatedly adjusted to change job and labor categories long after the work was performed without "adequate explanations," the auditors said.

"We found significant internal control weaknesses regarding the reliability of the recorded labor hours," said auditors from the Defense Contract Audit Agency, which was hired by the TSA last year to examine the Unisys contract. "We were unable to quantify the impact of the adjustments due to the lack of verifiable documentation."

The TSA has not publicly released the audits. The Post obtained copies independently.





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