Massive Fraud by EPA Employee
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
While the Health and Human Services Department deserves to get the majority of media attention for incompetence for its problem plagued roll-out of ObamaCare, it is by no means the only example of bureaucratic ineptitude.
Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is experiencing an extremely embarrassing episode of its own.
In an unbelievable story, John C. Beale, a former high ranking EPA employee pretended to be a CIA spy for over 10 years and during that time he collected a salary and travel expenses while he was on fake operations. In one example, he was absent from the EPA office for eighteen months.
From NBC News:
The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, say federal prosecutors.
John C. Beale, who pled guilty in September to bilking the government out of nearly $1 million in salary and other benefits over a decade, will be sentenced in a Washington, D.C., federal court on Wednesday. In a newly filed sentencing memo, prosecutors said that his “historic” lies are “offensive” to those who actually do dangerous work for the CIA.
Beale took advantage of the EPA’s managerial incompetence to travel first class and stay at luxury hotels.
For example, one of the reports states, Beale took 33 airplane trips between 2003 and 2011, costing the government $266,190. On 70 percent of those, he travelled first class and stayed at high end hotels, charging more than twice the government’s allowed per diem limit. But his expense vouchers were routinely approved by another EPA official, a colleague of Beale’s, whose conduct is now being reviewed by the inspector general, according to congressional investigators briefed on the report.
Ironically, Beale’s boss was current EPA head Gina McCarthy when she ran the Office of Air and Radiation.
Allowing an individual to be highly paid without any accountability is outrageous and exposes the sheer incompetence of government bureaucracy to manage itself.
It’s bad enough the EPA’s regulatory efforts are killing jobs. Now we have an example of gross managerial ineptitude at the agency.
This is another example of exposing the waste, fraud and abuse of big government and justifies the need to cut the size of the federal bureaucracy.