Paragraph of the Day

Government auditors found that Unisys, the company building the Transportation Security Administration's airport-to-airport communications system, billed the government in allegedly unauthorized ways. For example, the company requested and received $131/hour in reimbursement for workers that it actually paid about $50/hour. It billed thousands of hours of overtime "at a 100 percent profit" and altered timesheets months after workers filled them out. The company admitted to the Post that it lumped "hard-to-categorize" workers in the highest-wage category but claims that the overtime was proper and that it was correcting worker errors in the timesheets. For its part, the TSA admitted that, in its rush to get the contract moving, it didn't monitor expenses well. (In 2003 the government had only 25 people overseeing the $1 billion contract; today there are 242 people.) Elsewhere in the piece, anonymous government officials admit that they deliberately low-balled the contract's price (it will eventually cost $3 billion) to please Congress.

--today's papers