The Pentagon, as you may have heard, has a line item in its budget called “waste, fraud and abuse.” OK. Not really. But it should have. It’s all the powers-that-be talk about when it comes to cutting defense, as if eliminating this trio of lard, larceny and laziness would let us cut the nation’s $1 trillion defense budget — when you include homeland security and vets — in half. Last month, you may recall, Sen. Bernie Saunders, I-Vermont, released a Pentagon report detailing rampant WFA in Pentagon contracts.
Luckily, the Pentagon has figured out how to curb such malfeasance, and detailed its plan last Friday in the Federal Register, the government’s compendium of pending rules and regs. Bottom line: defense contractors’ fraud hotline programs are lame. The posters they put up encouraging workers to rat out their colleagues aren’t good enough. In the past, if contractors had their own hotline posters, they didn’t need to put up posters from the Pentagon inspector general advertising the Pentagon IG’s own hotline. But no more.
“The DoD IG finds that this exemption has the potential to make the DoD hotline program less effective by ultimately reducing contractor exposure to DoD IG fraud hotline posters and diminishing the means by which fraud, waste, and abuse can be reported under the protection of Federal whistleblower protection laws,” the announcement reads. “Some contractor’s [doesn’t the government hire proof-readers anymore? — mt] posters may not be as effective as the DoD poster in advertising the hotline number, which is integral to the fraud program.”
So the Pentagon plans to require all companies with contracts of $5 million or more display the Pentagon’s own hotline posters. That’ll stop ’em (the number’s in the poster at the top of this item, if you want to make a quick call during your lunch break).