While your sons and daughters are placing their backsides on the line in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, some sleaze on the home front are taking advantage of government bureaucracy to make themselves rich.

Aug. 16 (Bloomberg) — A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to an Army base in Texas, U.S. officials said.

The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.

How did they manage to get away with this for the last seven years? Since there is a war on, the Pentagon “streamlined” the parts ordering process to ensure that equipment arrived in the field in a timely fashion. “Priority” invoices were often automatically paid to prevent backlog, but for some reason there appears to have been no follow-up examination of the books to protect you, the taxpayer, from being fleeced.

“The majority, if not all of these parts, were going to high-priority, conflict areas — that’s why they got paid,” Stroot said. If the item was earmarked “priority,” destined for the military in Iraq, Afghanistan or certain other locations, “there was no oversight.”

The scam was unearthed because someone finally noticed a ridiculously large bill, but one of the twin sisters is already beyond the reach of the law.

Today, a federal judge in Columbia, South Carolina, accepted the guilty plea of the company and one sister, Charlene Corley, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to launder money, Assistant U.S. Attorney Kevin McDonald said.

Corley, 46, was fined $750,000. She faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years on each count and will be sentenced soon, McDonald said in a telephone interview from Columbia. Stroot said her sibling died last year.

We can only hope that the law deals very harshly with these unscrupulous people. In the meantime, the Pentagon is planning to recover your misspent $20 million by selling off the sisters’ loot.

Stroot said the Pentagon hopes to recoup most of the $20.5 million by auctioning homes, beach property, jewelry and “high- end automobiles” that the sisters spent the money on.

“They took a lot of vacations,” she said.

This is your government in action, folks: wasteful, sloppy, and easily taken advantage of. It does not matter whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge; this is the nature of the beast. Large, bureaucratic institutions are structurally vulnerable to this kind of problem, and the federal government is about as large and bureaucratic as they come. That alone should give pause to those seeking to nationalize the health care system. Do you really think your two aspirin are going to be cheaper (or even available) when this same government is buying them for you?