Your taxpayer dollars at work ... building red tape

As if the government doesn't get a bad enough rap -- admittedly, frequently deserved -- now there's this. The Federal Timesjust reported on a new survey that just came out on Tuesday, which suggests that contractors don't profit from government work as much as is commonly thought. The survey was conducted by Grant Thornton, who isn't some suave movie actor or a relative to Cary Grant. Just in case you thought so. Obviously, I didn't. I knew from the start that it was a huge accounting/consulting firm. Really.

So, anyway, 69% of government contractors last year made profits of less than 10 percent from their government business, and seven percent of those contractors actually made no profits. Only 12 percent of the more than 100 government contractors queried brought in more than 15 percent from their government contracts in fiscal 2006.

And some of the reasons companies aren't making profits? Surprisingly, there's an awful lot of red tape involved when working with the government. I, for one, as Captain Renault in Casablanca famously said, "Shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here." OK, the quote doesn't match up completely to this example.