Accountants? Hah.

The nuclear scientist bloggers over at Los Alamos have succeeded in ridding themselves of their Director, Nanos. Now they're raising hell over the Dept of Energy and UCLA paying no attention to finances. So here, from http://lanos-the-real-story.blogspot.com , they say:

“The Energy Department has questioned $14 million worth of shutdown costs as unallowable under its contract with the university. In an unrelated audit, the agency’s inspector general found that the Energy Department and the university miscalculated fixed payments allowed to government contractors for home office expenses. For the last five years, the overpayment has totaled $21 million and escaped the government’s attention in part because it never asked the university for itemized expenses, according to the inspector generals audit. For that same reason, the government never noticed that it mistakenly had agreed to pay $8 million in university operational expenses of no benefit to federal taxpayers.

Energy Department officials appear inclined to surrender any claim to the $21 million but may seek reimbursement from the university for about $880,000 in clearly unwarranted university charges to the government. These included $140,000 in costs for student recruitment and donations.”

Excuse me. Did I read this correctly? DoE, because of its sloppy oversight, let UC get away with $28 million in unallowable charges, and now doesn't intend to ask for them back…and Congress is going to let them get away with this?? Is there a sweetheart deal going on between DoE and UC? If so, just how fair is the lab recompetiton?

You reporters out there reading this ought to follow this up. Something very, very fishy is going on in the DoE, and perhaps in Congress. Is there a quiet deal with the California delegation somewhere? If a company doing business with the government was found to have overcharged by $28 million, you better believe the GAO would want it back, with interest and perhaps even penalties. So how come the DoE gets away with it?

Which leads to another related question: Los Alamos Lab and the University of California have come in for a good deal of public criticism from Congress and others, some of it fair, some not. But conspicuously absent in this finger pointing has been the DoE.

In the end, the DoE owns the lab, UC just managers it. So the DoE is ultimately responsible for the poor management of the labs, and has clearly been complicit in covering up problems there for years. And the DoE concurred on the long lab shutdown, which must have cost the taxpayers close to a billion dollars, though the DoE is trying to low-ball the costs by not counting everything.

So how come no one is talking about firing the DoE staff that is supposed to have managed the lab and UC? How come no one is proposing closing down the DoE, who after all haven't invented anything of use yet?Seems to me the real ire of Congress and the public ought to be focused on the DoE, where the buck really stops, rather than on UC and the labs.

I'd say those questions are pertinent. Yes indeed. So where are the investigative reporters? They were certainly all over the mistaken rumor that one of the lab's hard disks had disappeared. Certainly all over the poor scientist in that department. Ah, but energy questions stop with Cheney, do they not? And Cheney gives no info on what arrangements he makes behind closed doors with the energy giants....like Enron.
Wrap.