From dropping your smartphone in the toilet to spilling coffee on your keyboard, most have experienced that sinking feeling associated with wasting money on technology. The U.S. government is no exception.

Three federal agencies may have wasted as much as $321 million on information technology investments, according to a study (.PDF) released Thursday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The study looked at the Departments of Homeland Security (DHS), Defense (DOD), and Health and Human Services (HHS) from 2008 to 2013.

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This waste isn't a result of soggy devices but duplicative investments. For instance, the study found that HHS spent $257 million on four separate "Enterprise Information Security" investments, which "maintain and secure the operations and assets" of the department.

"Many federal departments have poor IT investment management processes, especially when it comes to portfolio management that has been well documents in many GAO reports," David Powner, director of IT management issues for the GAO, told Mashable in an email.

You may be wondering how that amount of money could slip through the cracks. While $321 million is certainly a nice chunk of change, it's less than half a percent of the federal government's annual IT budget — $82 billion, according to the report.

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee chairman Tom Carper, a Democrat from Delaware, responded to the report in a statement released Thursday.

"As I like to say, ‘the road to improvement is always under construction,’ and clearly we still have work to do to continue to improve federal IT investments and reduce duplication in IT and throughout the federal government," Carper said.

In all, the GAO reviewed 590 IT investments and identified 12 "potentially duplicative investments." It made recommendations to these agencies based on the report.

"To the credit of DHS, DOD, and HHS, the vast majority of the IT investments examined did not appear to be duplicative," it reads.

Provided with a draft version of the report, two of the three agencies agreed with the findings. Only the Department of Homeland Security did not concur, insisting that its investments were not duplicative in a letter included in the report.

Read the full 31-page report here.

Image: Flickr, Tax Credits