When you're spending other people's money...

... No. It's not that simple. The general 'you' doesn't cover it. If I was spending other people's money, I'd still want to get a decent bargain. I expect I'd have a certain conscience on the matter. But such scruples, common sense and, indeed, recognition of ones own limitations are not the kind of qualities to be found in abundance amongst government bureaucrats. The key to success there is learned idiocy. Thus, according to the Register:

An all-party committee of MPs has found that successive governments' over-reliance on big IT companies and poor in-house skills, has led to a "perverse situation" in which governments have wasted "obscene" amounts of public money.

In its report titled Government and IT – a recipe for rip-offs: time for a new approach, the public administration select committee says that while the government is making cuts in response to the deficit, some Whitehall departments are spending an average of £3,500 on a desktop PC. It describes the situation as "ridiculous".

Conservative MP Bernard Jenkin, the chair of the committee, said: "According to some sources, the government pays between seven and 10 times more than the standard commercial rate for its work. However, the government does not collect the information needed to verify these claims."