Computer Crime.

Once in a while big thinkers in government come cup with novel ways to assist failing institutions that suck at just about everything. One such brilliant stroke was aimed at improving the famously awful public schools in the District of Columbia. In 1996 President Clinton ordered federal agencies to donate old but useful computer equipment to the schools.

Yet there's always a catch. For a computer to be a teaching tool, it has to make it into a classroom, an event that appears to be exceedingly rare in D.C. An audit by the D.C. inspector general of select district schools found that officials could account for only 35 of the 287 pieces of computer equipment the feds donated between 1997 and 1999.

It's easy to see how such mix-ups could happen, considering that not a single school, nor the district's warehouse, kept an inventory of the equipment. In one instance, 83 pieces of computer equipment intended for Anacostia Senior High School, located in one of D.C.'s poorest neighborhoods, never made it to its putative destination. Instead, the inspector general learned, the loot was handed over to two people identified as a "church member" and "another person who represented herself as an Anacostia high school employee who works for the night school."

Such mischief isn't limited to the computer program, which helps explain why the schools are often short of such essentials as books and roofs even though they spend close to $10,000 per student a year. "Although we focused on the controls maintained over donated property, our observations lead us to believe that there is an inherent weakness in property management in general," stated the inspector general's report, which concluded that the district's complete lack of inventory controls "encourages the potential for pilfering."