Government corruption??

40  2017-08-13 by Deficatingdefender

I'm a recently retired federal employee and things are getting bad - really bad. I didn't even work in national security. I worked with Infrastructure.

When I first started right of college I just did my job and went home. The work wasn't terribly stressful but it was a LOT of work.

Now we don't even do our own work. We have consultants do it and many times we don't even check their work. AND even worse some employees get consultants to do 'inherently' government work like awarding grants! The consultants will do this even though they know it's illegal because they may get fired. I knew one case where the consultant actually sent the award letters out to the grantee without the federal employee really checking up on things. Well to get a grant the budget office needs to be involved but in this case it was not and there was no money even though we told the grantee there was!

There are now so many red flags signaling possible corruption that I will list just the major ones I know about:

I had a second level supervisor who owned a mansion in a very exclusive neighborhood yet his wife did not work and he was sending his kids to private college. He may have had a lot of money but why would you chose to do this when you could have a house almost as nice in a neighborhood that wouldn't raise a red flag?

We are required to have a 'government travel card'. This is bullshit. The 'government travel card' is actually a JP Morgan credit card and if we didn't have one we could get fired. The government is paying JP Morgan for this and if they allowed government employees to use their own credit card there would be NO risk to the tax payer. Sounds like some high level person got bought off doesn't it.

We can only purchase Dell and Microsoft products unless it is a special purchase and Microsoft or Dell can't supply this product. In typical procurement this would never be allowed. Sounds like someone got bought off.

I had another second level supervisor who ordered my immediate supervisor to add an incentive to a contract that was already awarded. This is essentially paying more to the contractor to do what he was going to do any ways and is highly improper if not illegal.

A high level official in my agency was caught signing off on fraudulent travel vouchers but he claims he was duped. Now how could you be duped and yet be a high ranking government official? Would you sign off on a travel voucher for someone who doesn't work for you?

Our executive director would not allow people to apply for this certain job claiming that it was too complex and he needed a seasoned person to fill the position but he allowed one of his minions to acting in this position and eventually filled it with a person that was going to be retired in a year. All this took place when massive corruption was taking place in this office.

There are also other weird things like the baffling number of PIN numbers, Passwords and PIV cards we need. We needed dozens of software applications were only a few were necessary. This took days of my time because of forgotten passwords getting locked out or the PIV card stopped working. This is not efficient or necessary. I had coworkers who got locked out and sat the whole day doing nothing or they just went home.

In my final years I just stopped traveling or taking any training. In the past we had drop dead experts in their field who would give training to grantees for free and they loved this. Now we have to use consultants to give training at huge costs.

9 comments

1  fiercemodern 2017-08-13

So, I've noticed that one of the agencies has been giving out a lot of money to consultants for very shitty proposals lately (4-5 years). I won't say anything further for fear of self doxxing, not am I certain it's a conspiracy. But I'd be very interested to see if anybody else has noticed any sort of trends themselves.

1  Deficatingdefender 2017-08-13

My agency concurred in the award based on proposals submitted by contractors/consultants. No one in my office ever read one single proposal AND no one was really concerned about this. The grantee should vet the proposal but giving complete trust to a grantee is really dumb. Our grantee was very good so we were lucky.

1  ribbonx 2017-08-13

We worked in government facilities abroad. I've seen plenty of shit shadier than that.

And the favoritism, waste, and corruption are much worse overseas where Americans can't see it. Believe me.

1  Deficatingdefender 2017-08-13

I had the chance to work overseas now I'm glad I didn't.

The OIG enforcement in our agency does catch people but it's very hard to detect corruption especially collusion. OIG auditors always catch stuff and are a pain in the ass.

1  ribbonx 2017-08-13

No it's great, everybody's riding the gravy train and having a good time. You just have to learn to mind your own business and keep your mouth shut, and ferheavensakes don't make enemies of the wrong people. You do that and you're on an airplane headed back home the next day.

But the waste and graft are truly breathtaking; gargantuan. Looking at it from the perspective of a a lifelong taxpayer, they can't throw the people's money away fast enough. I got some of mine back. :)

1  Deficatingdefender 2017-08-13

I made enemies of a lot of people and I'm really proud of it. Of course I can't claim I was truly courageous because I was near retirement. And the best thing is that they are old miserable men who won't last too much longer!!

They tried to threaten me over the phone and I just hung up. They called my boss and I told her why don't you defend me! She just was stunned. They sent me emails and I just ignored them. When my retirement papers went in I told them to go to goddamn hell!

1  SauceOrSass 2017-08-13

How much of this do you attribute to privatization of government services? It is something I see as legalized graft to enable theft of tax money for private profit.

1  Deficatingdefender 2017-08-13

I can say unequivocally we need government. Government solved the Dust Bowl, built the Interstate. But something radically changed during my career about 20 years ago and it got worse about 10 years ago.

I retired because I was miserable in the last few years. All I was doing was rote box checking nonsense like did the Grantee include our federal contract provisions in their contracts which of course they all did because we told them to directly and they can download them from our website. I calculated we were submitting over 60,000 pages a year of box checked forms to HQ staff. This would be ok if they analyzed it and whittled the forms to the areas where there was a bigger risk but in the 10 years I was doing this they never did. I have no idea how big their staff was or who they could have possibly have gotten to go through this nonsense but they did and it must cost the taxpayer a fortune.

If you go on many government websites have links to facebook and twitter. Why do we allow private corporation this visibility?

And Somehow Trump got his hands on the Old Post Office building in DC to make a private hotel out of it. This is a federally owned building and Trump cannot own it, but essentially he does. If you look at the terms he probably leases it for something like 100 years. This would have been unheard of a few years back. What's next the Lincoln Memorial turned into a casino?

Did you know the CIA paid to develop Oracle but they gave the whole thing to Larry Ellison. So the taxpayer really should own Oracle, but somehow it was just given away.

I actually worked with a guy in my office who told me that this certain contractor he worked directly with was his 'friend'. That's really in your face blatant.

Another weird thing is that every federal regulation dealing with infrastructure adopts standards. After 911 and other tragedies we realized we needed life safety standards which were already developed but not mandatory. Our people in HQ somehow amazingly never adopted these standards. I am at a complete loss on how this could happen. Fortunately the grantees I worked with adopted these standards on their own.

1  jonseagull 2017-08-13

This is not efficient or necessary.

This is what happens when you're spending someone else's money and the cash flow faucet is on locked on full blast.

1  Deficatingdefender 2017-08-13

It's truly bizarre. I always tried to spend the money wisely but when a big money decision was made I always shunted aside.

Some of the stuff could have actually resulted in tremendous fatalities.

Our HQ people were almost totally useless. I would email them my concerns and every time the response would be:

I don't understand!

You must be mistaken!

What do you want me to do with this?!

Etc.

1  swordofdamocles42 2017-08-13

public money into private pockets.

it has always been thus.

1  LurkPro3000 2017-08-13

So I have a friend that works in higher education, a state school (which should basically be considered and extension of the government by how much gov funding and regulation governs the school). So anyways, she applies for and acquires a position in a new dept. of said school with the directive to completely overhaul ALL school and student records into digital data/data system. There were a total of three relatively low level cost employees hired to run this entire project. The first six months they realize they have to work with these "consultants" who are supposed to design the data system - as opposed to the school using their own IT/data system personnel, or hiring one person with the required skill set. The consultants were paid 15x the yearly salaries of the 3 person dept they were supposedly working for for 6 mos work - and it turned out that in the end they weren't actually required to produce a working data system in the end - the paid consultants just left off wherever they had "finished". The whole thing reeked of bullshit.

1  Deficatingdefender 2017-08-13

When I worked in our HQ office congress mandated that we upgrade our infrastructure data base to a modern relational database. They got a consultant to do it BUT the database was already developed! A colleague of mine who was a genuine genius protested and I tried to also. No luck! We handed off the developed database to the private sector AND paid these consultants to just take the 1970s era flat file data and dump into Oracle! This colleague of mine was what the taxpayers deserve but he was a threat because he was so smart and dedicated. He retired very disgruntled. He was doing things that no one else could do. High powered consultants would asked him if what they were doing was on track.