waste & abuse

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 16, 2001 | by Sean Paige

Turning Cops (and Teachers) Into Robbers

Giving good intentions a bad name has been elevated to an art form by the federal government, but perhaps nowhere more so than at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), where so many noble-sounding projects seem to come to ignoble ends.

Such seems again to be the case with HUD's "Officer Next Door" and "Teacher Next Door" initiatives, which were intended to strengthen cities by providing home-buying bargains to law enforcers and educators in certain urban neighborhoods.

However, the programs are so poorly structured and so lacking in safeguards against abuse, according to a recent inspector general (IG) report, that they tempted even some of our most selfless professionals into acts of potentially illegal selfishness.

Some of the nearly 3,800 police officers and teachers used the program as intended -- and collectively received about $152 million off the price of HUD properties when purchasing primary residences in urban neighborhoods. But many other participants took unfair, even illegal advantage of gaping program loopholes to buy second homes, flip properties for profit or set themselves up as landlords.

"Our interim results indicate that a high percentage of home buyers abused and defrauded the system," according to the IG, which reports that at least 81 officers or teachers participating in the program now are being or have been investigated for fraud. At least five of those investigations have led to criminal convictions and four more to guilty pleas, but HUD program staff in Washington reportedly believe that about one-quarter of program participants may in some way have violated its provisions.

Poor management and program monitoring by HUD, combined with a failure by the agency to communicate program requirements to staff members and program participants alike, is most likely to blame for the boondoggle, according to the IG. But blame also must rest with the teachers and police officers who, when their character was tested by a corruptible government program, were tempted into taking unfair advantage.

Your Tax dollars and Public Servants at Work

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) employees sometimes can seem like odd birds, with their willingness to put the rest of the world on hold to nurse their personal obsessions about this endangered salamander or that endangered snail. But in the interests of helping one rare critter, the whooping crane, relearn a behavior that once came to it naturally, FWS personnel in the Midwest are going to extremes by actually becoming birds.

FWS staff at one Midwestern wildlife refuge are on a mission to get a population of cranes raised in captivity to fly south for the winter. They plan to show the cranes the way personally by leading the flock on its migration with an ultralight aircraft piloted by a man in a bird suit. Once safely south, FWS hopes the birds will return on their own next spring.

FWS used this approach last November with sandhill cranes, which before being led to Florida by an ultralight had been raised in extreme isolation from humans and received months of extensive training in how to fly in formation with the plane. FWS personnel never were allowed out of bird suits while in the presence of the cranes and used hand puppets to interact with the animals. [Why cranes can't tell the difference between a real bird and a hand puppet is a mystery -- but at least may help explain their presence on the endangered-species list.]

So if you're sitting in your duck blind next November and spy an unfamiliar flock of birds flying by, tailing a plane piloted by a cartoon-character crane, please hold your fire. Intentionally harming whooping cranes -- and bird-brained federal employees disguised as whooping cranes -- is against the law.

Income-Tax Tidbit

First the bad news: Federal employees owe more than $2.5 billion in back taxes to the same government that employs them, according to a report produced annually since 1993 by the IRS.

Now for the good news: Though nearly 3 percent of federal workers are delinquent in paying taxes, that still is considerably lower than the 5.75 percent of all U.S. taxpayers who owe. And federal workers are twice as likely to be paying those debts off in regular installments than are taxpayers at large.

The departments of State (at 4.96 percent), Commerce (4.68 percent) and Education (4.58 percent) have the highest employee delinquency rates among major agencies, although all have seen considerable improvement since last year's report.

The departments of Agriculture, Treasury and Justice have the best record of employee tax compliance, at 2.20 percent, 1.93 percent and 1.74 percent, respectively.

IRS Commissioner Charles Rossotti notified each agency head of its tax-delinquency total by letter, the gist of which was: Together we can improve tax compliance and help foster public confidence in government.