In even their wildest Bolivian peyote dreams, Butch and Sundance never imagined a half-million dollar score but that’s almost how much two senior civilian Navy employees were looking to ride off with if their plan had not been exposed. Rolling in a third unnamed senior employee and the others who went, or were swept, along likely made the payday for all involved more than one million dollars. But this is not really a miniature Enron, and not an Adelphia clone, though here and there some superficially similarities may appear. The principal named perpetrators here really were, in the opinions of nearly everyone who knows them, honest and highly respected good people. It's the sort of situation that makes you scratch your head and ask "Who are those Guys?"

The Government Executive article "Losing Their Religion" provides a short overview of the scheme which apparently involved, at it’s core, the rather liberal use of the Religious Compensatory Time that is available to Federal employees. But there is more to the story. The whistleblower speaks in "Principles of Ethical Conduct...The Ultimate Bait and Switch" which is available in Breakthroughs: The Research Journal of the MIT Security Studies Program Spring 2004, Vol. XIII, No. 1 (6.4M PDF file), a tale of double standards that should surprise no one. Left unstated is information on the trigger that motivated the whistleblower’s action, one always wonder’s what this might be; details of the financial pain of other employees at the lab from leave they lost when the administrative policies that accompanied the modified comp time process were corrected and; most importantly, the immeasurable loss of credibility the lab and it’s employees suffered within the Navy community.

There’s a fascinating movie here somewhere and, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, it should be cautiously prefaced with a black screen reading "Some of that which follows is true".