Huey,
Along about that time I was involved in Fraud Investigations for what is now NCIS. In a training class at the Navy Supply School in Athens, Georgia....an Officer there tried to explain away how all that so innocently happened and how there really wasn't a problem and there was no attempt to cheat the Navy.
His example was the accounting method used to figure the costs of each line item within the contract. At the time he was speaking I happened to have a General Services Catalogue on the desk next to my notebook. As he talked, and I was taking notes of what he was "teaching" us.....I keyed on something he said having made the note.
He was talking about hand tools....and how the accounting method was really the problem. He flashed on the viewing screen part of the contract that applied to what he was saying. In that list was a thing called "Device, Impact, Manually operated". A layman would have called it a "Hammer" and a Specialist would have called it a" 12 ounce Ball Peen Hammer".
I went to the GSA Catalogue and roamed through the Hammer section and found literally hundreds of different kinds of hammers, wedges, mallets, ball peen hammers, tack hammers, roofing hammers, claw hammers, sheet rock hammers, brick hammers....you get my point.
He was dumbstruck when I told him of that and the fact at no point was there an entry for "Device, Impact, Manually operated" anywhere in the GSA catalogue.
He got really flumoxxed when I asked him why the builder of the F-18 did not just call it a fecking hammer instead of what they did if they were not trying to pull a fast one?
A hammer is a hammer is a hammer.....is it not?
One outcome of those investigations was a program called BOSS....Buy Our Spares Smart....that encouraged employees to challenge any questionable pricing and rewarded them with percentages of the savings made. A simple practice borrowed from the private sector historically unknown to government.