By: Mary Lou Lang
https://justthenews.com/mary-lou-lang
The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just The News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s.
NASA wasted $35 million on unused software, software fines and penalties, and its lack of software management exposed the space agency to numerous risks, according to a new report by the NASA inspector general.
The watchdog broke down the $35 million in wasteful spending into $15 million in unused Oracle licenses and $20 million in fines and overpayments.
>>"The Agency does not have a centralized, authoritative database or inventory that tracks what licenses have been purchased, specific licensing agreements, and whether licenses are available for use by others at the Agency," Inspector General Paul K. Martin said in the report. "These shortcomings have resulted in NASA spending approximately $15 million over the past 5 years on unused Oracle licenses."
Adequate software management might have prevented the loss of tens of millions of dollars more, the IG determined.
>>"Based on the data available, we found that in excess of $20 million has been unnecessarily spent on software fines and penalties over the last 5 years," reported Martin. "In our judgment, penalty expenditures were potentially avoidable if an enterprise-wide Software Asset Management program had been operational. Therefore, we are questioning the $20 million in penalties."
The agency's software asset management shortcomings expose the agency to "operational, financial and cybersecurity risks," the IG further warned.
https://justthenews.com/accountability/watchdogs/sunnasa-wastes-35-million-unused-software-fines-and-penalties-watchdog