The seven-year contract with Parsons Infrastructure will end up costing $590 million, compared with $339 million, the cost if the state had conducted the inspections itself, the report said.
"Furthermore, as would be expected, the evidence of serious safeguarding concerns uncovered by the emergency inspection itself... were taken into account".
[For more on this topic, see "Bringing Green Homes Within Reach: Sustainability Meets Affordability," p. A24 this issue.] A hidden cost in that equation, however, is that of the Energy Star inspection itself, which can run from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
Based on this information one can decide whether to reinspect a document to ensure that it is below a prespecified defect density threshold, and that the inspection process itself has attained a minimal level of effectiveness.
But it is the inspection process itself which is likely to make the most difference: it is now clear what a well-run council can achieve, and where the badly run ones are going wrong.
A couple of weeks earlier, Vice-President Cheney had declared that Hussein Kamel's story "should serve as a reminder to all that we often learned more as the result of defections than we learned from the inspection regime itself".
The weapons inspectors appointed by the UN said that he did not, either in his formal (vast) declaration in December or in the inspections process itself.
The inspections Commission itself, however, has been put on the defensive as one of its inspectors, Scott Ritter, a former American Marine, quit in August, charging that both the United States and Mr. Annan caved in to Iraq.
Mr. Bustani refuses to go, and without American contributions, in May the inspection agency could find itself so short of cash that all inspections could come to a screeching halt.
The first is that the Ofsted inspection system itself has failed to improve standards in so many parts of the country.
