auditor0007
Gold Member
The Department of Defense, already infamous for spending $640 for a toilet seat, once again finds itself under intense scrutiny, only this time because it couldn't account for more than a trillion dollars in financial transactions, not to mention dozens of tanks, missiles and planes.
The Pentagon's unenviable reputation for waste will top the congressional agenda this week, when the House and Senate are expected to begin floor debate on a Bush administration proposal to make sweeping changes in how the Pentagon spends money, manages contracts and treats civilian employees.
The Bush proposal, called the Defense Transformation for the 21st Century Act, arrives at a time when the nonpartisan General Accounting Office has raised the volume of its perennial complaints about the financial woes at Defense, which recently failed its seventh audit in as many years.
Military waste under fire / $1 trillion missing -- Bush plan targets Pentagon accounting
Without doubt, our government wastes money in a way that would never be tolerated in the private sector, and this happens in all departments and agencies. Here's an idea; what if every department withing the federal government was set up so that bonuses were paid to department heads based on how much money that department comes in under budget? In other words, a department is given a set budget every year. If costs can be reduced, management and the "CEO", whoever heads that department, receives 15% of the actual savings. The more they save, the bigger the bonus. The way it works now, the more employees under someone, the more the bigger their salary. Why are their salaries not tied in some way to fiscal responsibility?
What is lacking in government, at all levels, is a decent rate of productivitiy. Growth in productivity in government lags far behind that of the private sector. This is why government continues to grow and grow, while producing little more than it ever has. If productivity could be increased by 15 to 20 percent, something the private sector achieves all the time, then costs would be reduced, or we would get more out of our goverenment for the money we spend.
http://www.lhc.ca.gov/lhcdir/reorg/MendoncaAttachmentCNov04.pdf