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EE’s statement is about as falsifiable and direct I would say:

Once a month, we billed for our work and submitted an updated estimated per badge final cost - committing as costs built to discount our work as necessary in order to hit DEFCON’s per unit cost targets.

In June, after 5 months of late night work, badges were fully designed, prototypes were working, and mass production was ongoing with the manufacturers we contracted on behalf of DEFCON. We billed DEFCON for our most recent work, discounting our labor by 25% in order to meet the agreed upon targets. Unfortunately, we were instead met with a work stoppage request and informed we would no longer be paid for services already rendered.

Easiest way for me to reconcile these is by assuming that DEF CON’s statement about going 60% over budget is referring to the estimated per badge final cost, not actual invoices. But yea, it’s hard to know what happened here just based on these statements.




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