Back in August, I wrote a post on a WaPo article about George Raymond, a former Army official with the Communications-Electronic Command (CECOM), and allegations that Raymond steered government contracts to his friends and then broke ethics rules by taking a comfortable job in the contracting industry afterwards. The Post is now reporting that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee – which has been investigating the matter since the story broke – recently requested all documents, emails, and material related to the $200 million worth of CECOM technology contracts that Raymond allegedly steered to friends.

Yesterday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced the results of its tax amnesty program that ended on Oct. 15. It turns out some 14,700 taxpayers came forward to report previously undisclosed foreign bank accounts under the voluntary disclosure program the IRS implemented following the U.S. government's settlement with Swiss Bank UBS earlier this year.

Ugh oh, a recent article in National Journal (subscription required) quotes several members of Congress, including Senate Budget Chair Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA), expressing strong interest in the creation of a bi-partisan debt-reduction commission with binding recommendation powers to Congress. It seems Conrad, Wolf, and other budget hawks see the administration's need to raise the debt ceiling as the perfect opportunity to press for the creation of such a body. While there's nothing wrong with a debt commission per se, I find the timing and details of this scheme troubling for a number of reasons.

On Friday, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its Monthly Budget Review (MBR) for October. It's a look back at the good old days of Fiscal Year 2009, with all the spending, and borrowing and loss of revenue...wait, did I say "good old days?" Let's examine CBO's goodbye to the not-so-great fiscal year that was.