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In article writes:

: They were paying (and passing on to the Government) rental fees like
: $5/day for an extension cord

Plus as you noted it was for *rental*. They didn't even have to give them
up. Nice job Pearsons and TSA.

A lot of governmnet contracts are written with the provision that
things get rented rather than bought. If the contractor had purchased
the extension cords and simply billed the Government for them (plus
their allowed markup), they would become Contract Acquired Property
and would have to be turned over to the Government at the end of the
contract period. The Government would then have to dispose of or find
a use for them. They couldn't simply tell the contractor "keep 'em, we
don't want them." Everything that the Government buys belongs to the
taxpayers, and we wouldn't want them throwing valuable stuff away.

The contractor probably should have obtained a better rental deal for
the government, though, and I imagine that's where the investigation
is going to go. But anyone who has ever put on an event at a hotel and
had to rent A/V equipment from the hotel's contractor knows what kind
of outrageous rates they have for simple stuff. They're pricing is
based on 1 or 2 day rentals (for a seminar or meeting, for example)
rather than 2-month operations.

I once held a small meeting in a hotel in Denver in one of their
conference-sized rooms (a hotel room with a conference table big
enough for six or eight people instead of a bed) and asked about
coffee. They quoted something like what this contractor was paying,
nearly $3/cup for the service. I just brought the coffee pot down from
my room.

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