In the world of government contracts, companies need to walk a fine line between complying with the demands of the government and putting their own interests first. This is especially true when it comes to doing work for the military.

When the military puts out a request for a bid on a contract, companies know that it can be worth massive amounts of money, so they will do almost anything to win. That is what was happening to the company in this story, where the military demanded that they hand over proprietary data about past work to a competitor because that data technically belonged to the government.

The company came up with creative ways to comply with the demand without actually handing over anything that could be useful. This went as far as printing off the code for the data onto paper and shipping it to the competitor. Eventually, it got to the point where it became clear that the competing company couldn’t do the work at a reasonable price, so this company won the contract.

While wasteful and borderline unethical, it worked out for this company in the end. Check out all the details below to get an insider picture that explains at least in part why the government spends so much money.

Malicious Compliance in Aerospace (Kinda Long)

I was reading a story about a contract programmer that printed all of the code/scripts they’d written out to paper to hand off to their former employer upon termination.

Legally it checked all the boxes, but was basically unusable unless someone re-keyed it all in.

This reminded me of my own experience.

Note, this story is a combination of aerospace engineering and IT so a little background is needed.

Companies like this need to look at the long-term big picture.

When you are a major airframe manufacturer and you design and build aircraft for the US Department of Defense (DoD), it’s not uncommon to make little money off the initial work.

The real profit often comes from the decades of follow on work. Enhancements, modifications, new variants, new payloads, new engines, new customers/requirements, etc.

The initial design and analysis is almost always the starting point for that additional work. So, needless to say, it’s protected like gold since nobody could compete for follow on work without it.

Problem is, it technically/legally might belong to the DoD.

I’m sure this company desperately wants this contract.

So here I am a kinda new Aero Engineer and Departmental IT guy (Engineer, FORTRAN programmer, HP-UX Admin, Oracle DBA, etc.) DoD puts out a contract for bid to do a metric mega-ton of analysis work on an aircraft my company stopped building 20+ years earlier but were still in heavy use.

The contract was very lucrative. And whoever did that analysis would, of course, get to do the physical work for even more $$$.

Normally, this contract would go straight to my company since only we had the data needed.

But the DoD Program Office wanted to have someone else compete for it as leverage for a better deal and instructed us to deliver a copy of all the legacy engineering data to the other company. Again, legally this was their data, not ours. We just had it.

Good, they can get everything together in one place.

And we had it all over the place. Mainframe (two different flavors of IBM OSes) files, magnetic tapes, Oracle on HP-UX, etc. Decades of analysis data.

So, after discussing it with my boss, I wrote some code to tap into each of these sources, extract the data, and write it to mainframe files which were “loosely structured” slightly-less-than-single-precision.

I then dumped them to our massive industrial size printers. Seven feet of green bar tractor feed paper later, we shipped it to our competitors.

DoD came back to us and said in no uncertain terms that if we ever want to win a contract again we better send it to them in digital format. Which to me, meant mainframe tapes. (Easy peasy for us to do, not so much for the competitor to use.)

They are playing a dangerous game that is causing delays.

DoD came back again and said they knew we had this ported down to HP-UX and we better provide it on more modern media.

Now at the time, HP had these state of the art big funky CDs that were once writeable. To use them you needed a specific tower CD reader/writer and associated workstation to connect it to (which we had).

Total cost of that setup was $50K for just the hardware.

Once again, they are technically complying with the demand.

So after several days of binary ftp’ing the files down from the mainframes, I burned them to those funky CDs and we shipped off the “loosely structured” (tough to parse with code), less-than-single-precision (worthless), EBCDIC (not unusable, but not straightforward), HP-proprietory-formatted media to the competitor.

DoD came back again and said quit playing games and send the original data.

So, I managed to get it onto some media that they could use. And this was THE GOLD DATA. Double precision, binary, massive, etc.

Now this is something the DoD does not own.

DoD came back again and said that the competitor needed the FORTRAN 4 source code to read the binary data. But while the DoD owned the data, my company wrote that code back in the 60s/70s and we owned it.

So, we graciously offered to sell them a copy for something like 10x the value of both the analysis contract and estimated value of the re-manufacturing contract.

Which was actually fair because this WAS our code and had all of our intellectual property in it.

We won both contracts. The aircraft in question has now been retired.

It is kind of scary to think that this is how things work when it comes to military contracts. How much time is wasted, and how many billions of taxpayer dollars are gone because of things like this? That being said, it is pretty funny.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an IT department who keeps receiving tickets for a company that was previously spun off.

Read on to see what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about this story.

The data is technically there, even if it is useless.

This commenter loves this story.

This is exactly right.

Maybe they didn’t think about this option until the end.

They have nice things, but it just costs taxpayers way too much.

Funny story, but this type of thing is why the government wastes so much money. Allowing this company to essentially hold this work hostage with what comes down to a no-bid contract means they can charge whatever they want.

How many millions (or billions) of dollars would be saved if the government held onto all this data and could send it out to any company that wanted to bid on a contract? This is taxpayer money that is just being wasted.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an IT worker who logged on early to fix something simple, and discovered a system-wide cyber attack instead.