According to Fox News on-line, employees of what they refer to as “the obscure General Services Administration” are “quietly gobbling up 10 percent of the entire federal government's bonus checks.”
At a hearing on alleged mismanagement and waste at the GSA, Transportation Committee Chairman John Mica, a Florida Republican, called the latest revelations "absolutely outrageous" whereas a preliminary investigation showed bonuses totaled $44 million, many worth $50,000 apiece with some going to workers now under investigation. One employee, he said, received a $79,000 bonus, adding up to nearly $260,000 in total compensation. Another with an an $84,000 salary received $115,000 in overtime.
As I read the article I was reminded of a company in my business, equipment financing, that many years called itself simply “OPM,” with no further description for the three letters comprising their name. They were an extremely aggressive group in the main-frame computer leasing business, very competitive, hard to beat by others and spent money quite lavishly on themselves and everywhere else.
I don’t recall how long they lasted in total, but were around for quite a while and a competitive thorn in their rivals sides. And then one day it surfaced that they’d allegedly duplicated many contracts they’d signed with household name clients and then “sold” or “discounted” the same agreements to a number of different banks thereby collecting multiple times on singular contracts. And it was only after they were shut down for their illegalities that we all found out that OPM stood for “Other People's Money.”
And it was OPM that popped into my head while reading about the GSA, because the major problem with them, and almost all government endeavors no matter, is that they all spend other people’s money and have no responsibility for earning it whatsoever.
What’s more is the fact that no private enterprise on earth could survive, much less even stay in business, were they to operate as incompetently as most government operations. However, no one seems to notice or care.
But perhaps taxpayers might make some headway if a simple adjustment was made to the GSA, as well as many other agencies. A demand to change their name to OPM, along with a definition of what the letters stand for, might wake a few folks up.
That’s it for today folks.
Adios
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