The bathroom on the C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane is nothing special. The soap dispensers are exactly the same kind of pump that customers might find on a civilian airliner or in a restaurant bathroom. But the U.S. government paid 7,943 percent more for the soap machines than what it should have, costing taxpayers $149,072, a new report by the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Defense found.
The report was the result of a two-year audit of U.S. Air Force purchases from the Boeing Company. Out of a selected sample of 46 spare parts for the C-17, the Pentagon's internal watchdog found that the Air Force overpaid for 12 of them, costing taxpayers an additional $992,856 on top of the parts' $4.3 million value.
