And there’s one more question:

Was everyone who was issued a paycheck an actual person?

From an auditing standpoint, when you trace from the actual vials, etc. forward to the database, then you are testing for completeness. In other words, are all of the assets that exist recorded on the books? Auditors will always do samples both ways. From the records to actual inventory, and from inventory to records. When you go from the books to the inventory, then you are testing for existence. Do all the assets recorded on the books actually exist in the warehouse?

It is beyond disturbing that so little care was taken in keeping track of this stuff.

i just think it’s a lot, A LOT, harder to keep track of biological samples that can be cultured from a tiny amount – such a tiny amount i don’t see how it would be possible to know it was missing. imo it’s much much harder than, for example, keeping track of radioactive material. stuff that reproduces from microscopic amounts is another matter entirely.

if safety is the concern, then imo the first thing we ought to be doing something about is the explosion of building since 911 for bsl-4 labs (iirc ivins only worked in a bsl-3 lab) all over the country including in major metropolitan areas. insane.

And it wouldn’t really do any good because they wouldn’t match the IRS records….

The point is, of course, that we do a better job getting payroll taxes right than those guys were doing with tracking their biowarfare samples. I was just going ballistic on somebody this morning because they did something that makes it harder to track what happened with one person for whom we will have to issue a corrected form (only the name is wrong on the W-2, but on Friday it looked like we might have credited the wrong SSN with the wages). In our systems (which I think could be significantly improved), it took mistakes by 4 different people to create the possibility of this problem. In Ft. Detrick’s system, there was essentially no control. It’d be laughable if it weren’t so scary.

hmmmm, must have been Rumsfeld.

My search skills are primitive. If this seems relevant, would one of you experts see what you can find?

So Shooter’s obsessions actually had useful application.

Naked Credit Default Swaps weren’t good enough to prove Repugs abject failure.