Day: October 13, 2014

The Consumerist reports that a man known as Conal complained to Comcast after he was billed for services he didn’t actually have. After Conal’s complaint, the company promised him extra television channels as a make-good but instead sent him a variety of equipment he didn’t need.

Conal complained to Comcast again after he was billed $1,820 for the surplus hardware. This is where things get interesting. Conal, who says he works for a large American accountancy firm, compiled a spreadsheet showing every erroneous charge he had received from Comcast, which he sent to the company.

Comcast then apparently refused to reverse the error, so in February 2014, Conal decided to try something else. Being an accountant, Conal contacted Comcast’s comptroller, the office that looks after the company accounts. He said he repeatedly called them about his bill, telling them that Comcast should be investigated by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

The Consumerist says that after this, Comcast got in touch with Conal’s employer.

At some point shortly after that call, someone from Comcast contacted a partner at the firm to discuss Conal. This led to an ethics investigation and Conal’s subsequent dismissal from his job; a job where he says he’d only received positive feedback and reviews for his work.

Terrible customer service from Comcast has itself become a meme and was recently highlighted by making a man wait on hold until the office closed and by a customer service rep refusing to cancel a man’s service.

Read the full story at Ars Technica.

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Filed under: Government/Legal, Military

What’s $100 million among the armed forces? Well, when that $100M is spent shipping unnecessary military equipment back from Afghanistan to the United States, it serves to shine some light on military waste.

According to a new report from the Government Accountability Office, the US Marine Corps and Army burned over $100 million during a one-year period shipping unneeded MRAPs and other vehicles from Afghanistan back to the US. As many as one out of every nine Army and USMC vehicles shipped back to the US is "unneeded," says the GAO, while each individual vehicle could cost as much as $107,400 in shipping fees.

As many as one out of every nine vehicles shipped back to the US is "unneeded," while each one could cost as much as $107,400 in shipping fees.

Instead, it may have been more cost effective to destroy the surplus trucks and leave their remains in Afghanistan. Of course, such a move would put a major ding in the DOD’s controversial 1033 program.

"Due to ineffective internal controls, the Army and Marine Corps may be incurring unnecessary costs by returning equipment that potentially exceeds service needs or is not economical to return and repair," the report says, according to Army Times.

Between October 2012 and October 2013, the DOD returned or destroyed nearly 15,000 vehicles. The total cost of recovering equipment from Afghanistan is expected to hit $6 billion, Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright told Army Times. The recovery is proceeding on schedule, but the waste of $100 million is still raising some eyebrows among members of congress.

"The Government Accountability Office underscores that the DOD can and should do a much better job in preventing unnecessary costs by taking some common sense steps in managing its surplus military vehicles. We simply cannot afford this type of waste and ineffectiveness," Sen. Tom Carper, a democrat from Delaware and a member of the Homeland and Government Affairs Committee, said.

What are your thoughts? Is the recovery of MRAPs and other military vehicles, regardless of the cost, preferable to destroying them? Should the DOD have planned better for after the end of operations in Afghanistan? Have your say in Comments.

How the DOD could have saved $100M by blowing up 1,000 trucks originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 01 Oct 2014 16:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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