(RealClearWire)—A Department of Energy lab in Illinois logged over $160 million in questioned costs due to lost invoices, excessive reimbursements, and holiday pay, according to a recent audit by the agency’s inspector general.
The audit examined costs incurred in 2018 by Fermi Research Alliance LLC, the contractor that operates the Fermi National Accelerator Lab near Batavia, Illinois. The Energy Department owns the lab, which receives millions in funding from the federal government. The lab also received $260 million from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.
The inspector general’s audit found that costs claimed by the contractor were not always allowable or reasonable. The inspector general questioned $160 million in indirect costs as unsupported, $15 million in subcontract costs as unresolved (pending an audit), and $2.5 million as unsupported, unallowable, or unreasonable.
Specifically, the inspector general had many concerning findings. They include Fermi Research Alliance’s loss of over $2.4 million in vendor invoices, unreasonable subsistence reimbursements to visiting scientists and researchers in excess of $30,000, and excessive holiday pay exceeding $50,000. He also found that Fermi Research Alliance was not in compliance with federal cost-accounting standards.
The Energy Department’s inspector general concluded: “These issues could result in the department reimbursing [Fermi Research Alliance] for costs that were unallowable, not allocable, or unreasonable.”
This mismanagement directly impairs the Energy Department’s mission, the audit found, since these questionable expenditures could have gone toward further research efforts at the lab by purchasing more equipment or hiring more researchers.
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The waste was completely preventable by enforcing accounting standards and frequently auditing to ensure they are met, the audit found, but instead lax oversight meant these issues went undiscovered for five years.
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Not ONE additional drop of energy has been realized since Jimmy Carter’s Department of Energy was enacted. Both Reagan & Trump campaigned about eliminating the DofE entirely, but the establishment’s enemies in their administration prevented this needed abolishment of DofE. .
DEFUND the AGENCIES that are purely EVIL…NEARLY ALL that are not listed in the CONSTITUTION are now costly and useless. Just gives a bunch of losers a job- a high-paid job, because ‘they’ do not have to JUSTIFY anything ‘they’ do today. They state an OATH ON THE BIBLE to ‘protect and defend’. ‘They say the OATH WITHOUT TRUTH being involved. And , as ‘they’ took office on a LIE ‘they’ figure just keep doing it. All lies lead to more lies. So many of ‘they’
are PURE LIARS. “God hates liars”. Do you think the God that has lead this country to this point (or at least attempted to) towards prosperity will CONTINUE when He sees that He is no longer even considered when making decisions that AFFECT over 300,000,000 beings?
Yep, just like ‘kids’ that ‘take over’ a living business only to an END RESULT of failure, we today have CONgress.