Subcontractor's Story Details Post-9/11 Chaos

[MountainLaurel]

Long, but informative story that we all need to look at in reference to the question "Are we safer now?"


Three years ago, Sunnye L. Sims lived in a two-bedroom apartment north of San Diego, paying $1,025 in monthly rent. Then she landed a dream job, with $5.4 million in pay for nine months of work.

snip

Sims is not a Hollywood starlet. She is a meeting-and-events planner who built her fortune on a U.S. government contract. In 2002, her tiny company secured a no-bid subcontract to manage logistics on an urgent federal project to protect the nation's airports in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Sims, now 42, recruited hundreds of people to help hire a government force of 60,000 airline passenger screeners on a tight deadline. With little experience, her tiny company was asked to help set up and run screener-assessment centers in a hurry at more than 150 hotels and other facilities. Her company eventually billed $24 million.

The company, Eclipse Events Inc., was among the most important of the 168 subcontractors hired by prime contractor NCS Pearson Inc. The cost of the overall contract rose in less than a year to $741 million from $104 million, and federal auditors concluded that $303 million of that spending was unsubstantiated.

Spurred by that audit, federal agents are examining the entire contract and focusing on Eclipse, according to government officials and Pearson. Investigators at the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General are trying to determine how and why Eclipse obtained the work and whether the company overcharged the government or submitted false claims.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/27/AR2005072702436.html

[htuttle]

1. A meetings and event planner managing our airport security logistics?

Bwhahahahahah! :rofl:

We're SO fucked!

We're so fucked, I have to laugh!

:rofl:

[peacetalksforall]

2. She must be a super qualified christian. Yeah Hooooie!

Also from blogspot:

"Sunnye Sims, 42. "Sims is a travel industry entrepreneur who now serves as a program director at an Evangelical Free Church in southern California. She served as marketing and sales director for a group called the International Travel Directors Association in Orlando" . "

"$5.4 million claimed for nine months' salary for the chief executive of an "event logistics" firm that received a contract before it was incorporated and went out of business after the contract ended."

"It says she also granted herself a $270,000 pension."

http://nitpicker.blogspot.com/2005/06/put-on-your-sleuthing-hats-kidsin.html

[Rich Hunt]

3. uh huh

There are so many opportunities for b.s. in those "secondary" industries, like "planner" this and "consultant" that.

That just sounds like a laundry list of b.s. jobs.

I wonder what her education was like.