On Aug 23, 9:03*am, "Stuart & Kathryn Fields" wrote:
"Michel" wrote in message

*GAO as a review and
auditng function? *They audited my group once to determin if it served a
usefull function. *One of their key auditing functions was done by (I
watched this dumbfounded) measuring the volume of my groups file cabinets!!!

I'm not a fan of GAO, couple of reasons. My cousin, now deceased was
head engineer on Glomar Challenger. If you remember when we tried to
get the Russian sub up off the ocean floor, using the Glomar Explorer,
they looked almost identical. He got the Legion of Merit somehow.
Anyway, the Challenger was a National Science Foundation project to do
core samples from the ocean floor. Went and drilled all over the
place. Then cores were sent to NSF for analysis, storage and study.
GAO shut the project down as they only looked at so many centimeters
of core a year and they had thousands of feet of sample. So they had
enough to keep people busy. Ignoring the fact that a lot of the time
you have to drill down a certain distance to get the good stuff that a
geologist is looking for that was laid down so many millions of years
ago, depends on what you're researching. Which is why you collect core
samples.

When I got my MA, had GAO types show up and recruit. One of the things
that really got me was they would rotate out of different areas, say
Customs or DoD or Treasury every year or so. You never became an
expert in an area, just some sort of generalist who had no clue what
they were looking at, which seems to be the case here.

They also had a bizarre review system, the bottom 10% or something
were fired every review cycle. So you end up playing to the review and
being cut throat rather than doing your job. Seems GAO had come up
with this system as a Federal wide standard and nobody bought it, so
they implemented it themselves.

Maybe we can PCS them all to Iraq and leave them there. Then again,
there are a few others in government that ought to have that done to
them....