While the "overhaul" was supposed "to be
completed this fall,"Times journalist Eric Lichtblau disclosed that the
system will not be ready for prime time until "next year at the
earliest."
Overall, American taxpayers have shelled-out some $451 million to an endless parade of contractors, Lockheed Martin being the latest. Delays are expected to cost "at least $30 million in cost overruns on a project considered vital to national security" Lichtblau wrote, citing Congressional "officials."
But problems have plagued the project since its inception. Lockheed Martin,No. 1 on Washington Technology's "2009 Top 100" list of Prime Federal Contractors, secured some $14,983,515,367 in defense-related contracts last year and was brought on-board to revamp the troubled case management project.
This is all the more ironic considering that the defense giant was hailed as Sentinel's savior, after an earlier incarnation of the program known as Virtual Case File (VCF), overseen by the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), crashed and burned in 2006.
No slouches themselves when it comes
to raking-in taxpayer boodle, SAIC is No.
7 on the Washington Technology list, pulling in some $4,811,194,880
in 2009, largely as a result of the firm's close political connections
to the Defense Department and the secret state.
SAIC's work on VCF began in June 2001 and was expected to be completed in 36 months. However, after shelling out some $170 million over four years the Bureau concluded the system wouldn't work. Published reports fail to mention whether or not SAIC was forced to hand the loot back to cash-strapped taxpayers. Probably not.
Open-Ended Contracts: Hitting the Corporatist "Sweet Spot"
As with all things having to do with protecting their national security constituency from lean quarterly reports to shareholders, congressional grifters and secret state agencies alike are adept at showering giant defense and security corporations with multi-year, multi-billion dollar contracts.
After all, high-end CEO salaries and lucrative remunerations for top executives in the form of handsome bonuses are based, not on a firm's actual performance but rather, on the critical up-tick in the share price; just ask Lehman Brothers or other outstanding corporate citizens such as Goldman Sachs. Or SAIC itself, for that matter!
Unfortunately, effective oversight is not the forte of a plethora of congressional committees; nor are crisp, objective evaluations, better known as due diligence, conducted by outside auditors before scarce federal resources, which could be used for quaint things such as health care, education or other reality-based programs, pour into any number of virtual black holes.
Take VCF as an example.
In a post-mortem of the SAIC program,The Washington Post revealed back in 2006, that after spending months writing 730,000 lines of computer code, corporate officers proclaimed VCF's roll-out "only weeks away."
The trouble was, software problem reports, or SPRs, "numbered in the hundreds." Worse for SAIC, as engineers continued running tests, systemic problems were multiplying quicker than proverbial rabbits.
As Post journalists Dan Eggen and Griff Witte disclosed, citing an unreleased audit of the program hushed-up by the Bureau, because "of an open-ended contract with few safeguards, SAIC reaped more than $100 million as the project became bigger and more complicated, even though its software never worked properly."
Despite evidence that the system was failing badly, SAIC "continued to meet the bureau's requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI's approach to the project was badly flawed."
Auditors discovered that the "system delivered by SAIC was so incomplete and unusable that it left the FBI with little choice but to scuttle the effort altogether."
Overall, American taxpayers have shelled-out some $451 million to an endless parade of contractors, Lockheed Martin being the latest. Delays are expected to cost "at least $30 million in cost overruns on a project considered vital to national security" Lichtblau wrote, citing Congressional "officials."
But problems have plagued the project since its inception. Lockheed Martin,No. 1 on Washington Technology's "2009 Top 100" list of Prime Federal Contractors, secured some $14,983,515,367 in defense-related contracts last year and was brought on-board to revamp the troubled case management project.
This is all the more ironic considering that the defense giant was hailed as Sentinel's savior, after an earlier incarnation of the program known as Virtual Case File (VCF), overseen by the spooky Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), crashed and burned in 2006.
SAIC's work on VCF began in June 2001 and was expected to be completed in 36 months. However, after shelling out some $170 million over four years the Bureau concluded the system wouldn't work. Published reports fail to mention whether or not SAIC was forced to hand the loot back to cash-strapped taxpayers. Probably not.
Open-Ended Contracts: Hitting the Corporatist "Sweet Spot"
As with all things having to do with protecting their national security constituency from lean quarterly reports to shareholders, congressional grifters and secret state agencies alike are adept at showering giant defense and security corporations with multi-year, multi-billion dollar contracts.
After all, high-end CEO salaries and lucrative remunerations for top executives in the form of handsome bonuses are based, not on a firm's actual performance but rather, on the critical up-tick in the share price; just ask Lehman Brothers or other outstanding corporate citizens such as Goldman Sachs. Or SAIC itself, for that matter!
Unfortunately, effective oversight is not the forte of a plethora of congressional committees; nor are crisp, objective evaluations, better known as due diligence, conducted by outside auditors before scarce federal resources, which could be used for quaint things such as health care, education or other reality-based programs, pour into any number of virtual black holes.
Take VCF as an example.
In a post-mortem of the SAIC program,The Washington Post revealed back in 2006, that after spending months writing 730,000 lines of computer code, corporate officers proclaimed VCF's roll-out "only weeks away."
The trouble was, software problem reports, or SPRs, "numbered in the hundreds." Worse for SAIC, as engineers continued running tests, systemic problems were multiplying quicker than proverbial rabbits.
As Post journalists Dan Eggen and Griff Witte disclosed, citing an unreleased audit of the program hushed-up by the Bureau, because "of an open-ended contract with few safeguards, SAIC reaped more than $100 million as the project became bigger and more complicated, even though its software never worked properly."
Despite evidence that the system was failing badly, SAIC "continued to meet the bureau's requests, accepting payments despite clear signs that the FBI's approach to the project was badly flawed."
Auditors discovered that the "system delivered by SAIC was so incomplete and unusable that it left the FBI with little choice but to scuttle the effort altogether."
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