It's all twisted

The whole national IT infrastructure is bizarrely twisted and corrupt - if you bid for some government project against some money-pit behemoth like EDS, expertise, competence or budget account for nothing - you could come in a 10% of their bid for an identical offering and still not have a hope. For example, VOSA recently paid over £25K for the installation (no purchase or maintenance - that was covered elsewhere) of a straightforward web server. If I offered to do exactly the same job with the same guarantees for £2,500 (still pretty steep) they wouldn't look twice.

A relative was doing some work via a well-known government-approved subcontractor. After invoicing for the work done, the contractor requested that they resubmit invoices for twice the amount and offered to split the excess.