Yesterday, authorities arrested four men in connection with a massive bribery scheme inside the Army Corps of Engineers. As it turns out, the individuals involved in the arrests stand accused of producing fraudulent documents, then sitting back and pocketing the overages. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

And just like Harriette Walters, who, along with conspirators, who pilfered nearly $50 million from the District’s Office of Tax and Revenue in 2007, those arrested appear to have benefitted from a serious lack of oversight and a stunning inability to stop breaking the law:

Starting in 2007, the two corps program managers and Babb began steering that work to a Chantilly-based firm identified in court papers as “Company A.” That company’s chief technology officer, called an “unindicted co-conspirator” in court papers, then began filing inflated invoices for work to EyakTek, which passed the bills to the government. […] In total, prosecutors say, the conspirators inflated $25 million in work by about $20 million. They funneled the extra cash — which they called “overhead” — to themselves, prosecutors said.

Earlier this year, the men set their sights on another, possibly more lucrative corps contract worth about $780 million, prosecutors say.

The similarities don’t end there. Even the things that the accused bought with the allegedly dirty money — “millions of dollars worth of BMWs, Rolex and Cartier watches, flat-screen televisions, first-class airline tickets and investment properties” — sound a lot like the kind of things Walters bought.

Walters ended up getting sentenced to nearly 18 years in prison; one wonders whether the similarities between the two cases will extend to the degree of punishment.