"some government waste stories are more excusable than others, but this one is tough to make many excuses for. in 2004, the st. petersburg times reported that the u.s. department of defense “spent an estimated $100-million in six years for airline tickets that were not used and failed to seek refunds” – even though the tickets they had purchased were completely refundable! adding insult to injury the pentagon then happily reimbursed at least $8 million employees who claimed to have purchased these unused tickets. unsurprisingly, the reason that the unused ticket scandal (which spanned 1997-2003) took so long to be discovered is that the defense department relied on its employees to report unused tickets, which, of course, they did not."
|