Millions in contracts, no work completed (ANC)

What a mess, fraud and dishonor to our war dead and nothing is happening. This is an interesting article, a nice summary of what has (or hasn't transpired) in an series about the efforts to computerize location maps at Arlington. Bodies buried in the wrong spots, shady contractors, inept, perhaps corrupt, and certainly self-important civilian management. Our war dead deserve better.

This, from the comment section, sums up a portion of the outrage well:

Now let me understand this correctly. Because they are bullied and chastised by Right Wing tricksters, who violated the law, ACORN gets defunded. Meanwhile, we have at least four years of blatant FRAUD, tied to the Pentagon(no surprise), occuring with not even a peep from Fox Entertainment.

An Arlington National Cemetery official keeps sending work to the same small group of associates, with few results

Editor's note: This article is part of a special Salon investigation of America's renowned cemetery.
By Mark Benjamin

Arlington Cemetery

Sept. 29, 2009 | A top official at Arlington National Cemetery steered millions of dollars to a handful of contractors operating a series of different companies over the past several years. When the contractors would leave one company and start another, the official would hire them again, yet the work they were hired to do has never been completed. The firms have ostensibly worked since 2003 to computerize burial records at the cemetery, but to date, despite receiving as much as $5.6 million, they have produced almost nothing in return.

The small group of contractors, all favored by Deputy Superintendent Thurman Higginbotham, includes one currently facing more than a dozen counts of child sex offenses and a company that a cemetery information technology manager felt was so unqualified to handle sensitive private data that the manager resigned in disgust.

Since the contractors have failed to produce, the cemetery continues to rely on a flurry of paper records in an attempt to keep up with around 30 burials a day. Paper goes missing, current and former workers there say, resulting in burial fiascoes that occur with disturbing frequency.

-more-

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/29/arlington_contracts/index.html