An IT administrator working for the US Navy at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has pleaded guilty to the theft of nearly 20,000 items of equipment from his workplace.

Victor Papagno Jr, the systems manager at the defence agency stole 100 computers, 167 keyboards, 80 monitors, 275 mouses and 187 toner cartridges, according to vnunet.com.

Papagno's actions were only discovered after police were called to his family home to arrest him for assaulting his wife after an argument broke out over the vast amount of computer parts that he was storing in the property.

Officials from the NRL valued the amount of goods found at his home in the region of $1.6 million (£918,000), with no military secrets or confidential information found aside from the details of 14 former employees.

The NRL hires 2,500 researchers, technicians, engineers and support personnel and started its work at 11:00am on July 2nd 1923.

More than half of small businesses (53%) believe that the most important benefit of outsourcing is guaranteed response times for IT support, London based Connect conducted the research in 2007.