The administrative regions of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Environmental Protection Agency is one of my least favorite bureaucracies. It has outlived its usefulness to we the people. It is now serves the political agenda of a leftist president. Last week, a friend gave me a news clip published in the Wall Street Journal Nov. 21, 2013 titled “The Spy Who Fooled the EPA.” The story is a sick tale about an EPA employee who fooled his bosses into thinking he really did work for them.
All I know is that someone who tricks his superiors into believing he is worth being paid by not doing anything is one shrewd cookie. What makes me furious is that the EPA did nothing to reprimand him or his superiors for this conduct. Read the article below and tell me what you would have done about this guy if he was your employee.
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The Environmental Protection Agency wants to be the nation’s super-regulator, though it might first try to regulate its own employees. At least the ones pretending to be James Bond.
The Department of Justice in late September announced a plea agreement with John C. Beale , until recently a senior career employee at EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation. Beale, 64, has admitted to devoting most of his 23-year career to bilking taxpayers of some $900,000 in pay and expenses. “Saturday Night Live” couldn’t come up with this story.
Information released by law enforcement, and details from an investigation by Louisiana Senator David Vitter, show that the fraud began when Beale stated in his 1989 EPA job application that he’d worked for the U.S. Senate, though there is no record of such employment. By 1994 Beale was claiming he was a CIA operative to justify prolonged absences. Apparently this raised no eyebrows at EPA.
Prosecutors estimate that from 2000 to 2013 Beale was absent from his EPA duties for a total of 2.5 years, claiming to be working for “Langley” or on a special EPA “research project.” In 2008 he was gone for six months but never submitted a leave request. Around May 2011, Beale claimed to be retiring and celebrated with colleagues on a dinner cruise. An EPA manager admitted to not seeing Beale at the office after that, though not noticing until November 2012 that Beale was still on the payroll.
Beale used his “research” excuse to have taxpayers fund at least five trips to Los Angeles—worth $57,000 in travel expenses—to visit relatives and stay at nice hotels. Beale also claimed that he’d contracted malaria while serving in Vietnam, requiring taxpayers to cough up $18,000 for a handicapped parking spot in downtown Washington, D.C. He didn’t serve in Vietnam and he didn’t have malaria.
Beale was paid despite his absences and he received retention incentive bonuses that for a time made him among the highest paid employees at EPA. Mr. Vitter’s office has noted that Beale was only approved to receive these bonuses for six years, yet EPA somehow handed them out for 23. Spooks the world over are jealous.
To recap: The same agency that wants to regulate the nation’s carbon economy failed to vet a new hire, swallowed his spy stories, and paid a salary and bonuses to an employee who didn’t come to work and whom it didn’t notice was missing. EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins, who is investigating the agency’s employment and supervisory practices, says this fraud was the result of “an absence of even basic internal controls at the EPA.”
Mr. Vitter is pushing for a Senate hearing into EPA mismanagement, but Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer is resisting. Amid all of the other current demonstrations of government incompetence, perhaps she figures this is simply too embarrassing.
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Isn’t that a hoot? Imagine if you found a job at a private sector company and after working there for a few years you go absent for a month or two. You come back and your boss asks you where you were and you tell him you were working for someone else. First of all, I don’t know a single supervisor who would not fire someone who went missing for a month. Second, if he still worked for the company when he came back, he wouldn’t last a minute, especially if he told them he went to work for someone else.
It is my lame opinion after serving as a manager for over thirty years that I would not only fire the perpetrator, but I would fire his direct supervisor for not knowing what the hell was going on. Lastly, I would get fired for not knowing what was going on in my area of responsibility.
When you work for the Federal government things are different. Who cares what is going on? It’s only taxpayer money they waste so why not milk the system for everything it is worth?
The entire EPA must be scrapped and a law passed to crucify anyone who comes up with another agency that has the same objectives as the EPA.
Filed under: Conservative, family, Government, politics | Tagged: Barbara Boxer, Beale, David Vitter, Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, Los Angeles, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Wall Street Journal | 2 Comments »
