Secret Service indicts woman on wire fraud
Wallowa County Chieftain, OR - 29 May 2003
... It is our investigative assumption that there was no attempt to bring the babies
forward,said US Secret Service Resident Agent in Charge John G. Kirkwood ...
Hoping to get lucky, counterfeiters hit casinos
Chicago Sun Times, IL - 1 hour ago
... about $1000 a week in counterfeit bills is found at the region's five casinos and
nearby businesses, said Rob Gray, spokesman for the US Secret Service in ...
By Martin Edwin Andersen
� 2003 News World Communications Inc.
At a time when federal law enforcement finds its resources stretched to the limit with the war on terrorism, an increasing number of retired U.S. Secret Service agents are taking advantage of an anomaly in the retirement system, unavailable to other federal law-enforcement agents, that gives them complete retirement benefits even if they return to service as full-time investigators in other government agencies, Insight has learned.
One result of the legal but controversial special treatment extended to Secret Service retirees has been the packing of federal Offices of Inspectors General, or OIGs, with a "good-old-boy" network of former agents who frequently lack the specialized investigative skills needed to carry out the missions of the internal watchdog agencies, according to critics of this so-called "double-dipping" practice.
Payment of full retirement benefits, along with postretirement salaries as federal investigators, enables Secret Service retirees to earn incomes far above those of members of Congress and even of the Cabinet. This bypassing of the normal rules of the federal personnel system which are applied to all other job applicants, no matter how qualified has allowed retired Secret Service agents to compete unfairly for jobs within the federal IG community, say rivals and other critics, and to network their colleagues into OIG positions throughout government.
One example is the OIG at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD. As previously reported by Insight, the OIG there has been accused of patterns and practices of cronyism and patronage.
"The Secret Service guys end up getting hired, and it is claimed that their relevant experience comes from a background in credit-card fraud and counterfeiting investigations," says former HUD OIG assistant special agent in charge James Malloy. "But counterfeiting and credit-card fraud aren't problems at HUD/IG, where work requires specific knowledge of the department's mission and clientele. Basically, the [former] Secret Service guys don't have a clue about what they are doing there."
Since publication of the HUD expos�, Insight has been deluged with complaints of similar activity at other federal OIGs. However, while nearly all of those making the complaints were willing to provide documents to support their claims, most would talk only on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal from their retired Secret Service bosses and/or concerns about protecting pending litigation.
Among those who have stepped forward openly are two of the most highly regarded senior field managers at the HUD OIG, Malloy and Larry Chapman. They have filed equal-employment complaints claiming that they were subjected to humiliating investigations and forced to resign by two senior executive-level OIG officials in Washington, both of whom also are retired Secret Service agents.
In some cases, sources tell Insight, those daring to challenge decisions made by former Secret Service personnel working in the OIGs have been reminded that the retired agents including a number of those once assigned to the presidential-protection detail retain powerful friendships from their prior jobs.
"The other agents may hate their guts, but are scared to death" because of potential reprisals, Malloy tells Insight. "If you mess with these folks," says Dann Truxal, another HUD OIG special agent in charge and a retired Army officer who left the department after having been passed over for a key position in favor of a Secret Service retiree he thought less qualified, "you'll have Internal Affairs after you."
Critics say that among the OIGs which allegedly have fallen under the networking Secret Service retirees are those at the departments of Justice and Labor, both internal-affairs offices at Treasury, the Social Security Administration, or SSA, the Department of Veterans' Affairs and the Railroad Retirement Board.
Similar circumstances also have been alleged at the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Criminal Investigations, the IRS, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, Ga., the Office of Special Investigations in the General Accounting Office and the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, investigations unit.
The Secret Service, one congressional investigator tells Insight, "has the most incredible network throughout the IG community. They are everywhere." This is because "Secret Service agents are the only ones allowed to 'double-dip,'" explains a 21-year Secret Service veteran who has had a second career with an OIG in a key federal department. "Since these ladders go up and down, the Secret Service is now undoubtedly the most powerful federal law-enforcement agency because of it."
In the case of the OIG at HUD, those in charge of personnel matters are almost all Secret Service retirees the inspector general, the deputy inspector general, the assistant inspector general for investigations as well as his deputy and several special agents in charge. Numerous former Secret Service agents in the Special Investigations Division also wield great power because of the internal investigations they conduct. In a letter to Insight, HUD IG Kenneth Donohue angrily denied accusations that his office was "preselecting" former colleagues at Secret Service for employment at the HUD OIG, claiming such criticism to be "false and misleading."
Donohue's critics within the OIG and on Capitol Hill say that the appointment of so many former agents to high-level, high-paying jobs belies his complaints.
At the SSA, the inspector general is James G. Huse Jr., a former assistant director of the Secret Service; his principal deputy is Jane E. Vezeris, a former Secret Service chief financial officer. On their watch, former Secret Service agents now serving as senior IG staff have been the target of persistent allegations of gross waste and mismanagement, as well as abuses of authority such as using federal jobs as personal patronage. Preselection and preferential hiring of retired agents have become so bad, claim sources within the OIG, that Secret Service retirees working as IG administrators were admonished by a former boss to stop the practice, according to a document obtained by Insight.
Senior IG officials at SSA, the complaint noted, pursued a policy of "preferential practice of hiring and promoting friends, and friends of friends, that have retired from the Secret Service," creating in effect "a retirement haven for Secret Service agents."
Unhappy IG employees joke that SSA has begun to stand for "Secret Service Alumni." Among the Secret Service retirees currently serving in senior positions at the SSA are the assistant inspector general for investigations, his deputy and seven of the 10 special agents in charge of regional field offices.
Efforts to get the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, or PCIE, part of the Office of Management and Budget, to investigate this situation at the SSA have met with silence.
Critics claim that the PCIE is dominated by the IG community for which it is supposed to provide oversight and point out that it is headed by the federal government's longest-serving IG, retired Secret Service agent Patrick E. McFarland. In one of his first cases as IG at OPM, in 1990 McFarland had to apologize to the House Committee on Government Operations for a "flawed and incomplete" investigation of a White House employee that nearly resulted in an unjust discharge. Critics say this may have taught him the art of desultory caution.
The alleged practice of preferential hiring of Secret Service retirees, a growing number of critics say, goes to the heart of effective oversight of the federal bureaucracy by Congress, as it risks compromising the merit principles upon which the system is based.
As one of the last post-Watergate reforms, creation of the OIGs was to provide a first line of defense against illegal or unethical practices within the federal service. Members of Congress, particularly good-government watchdogs, say that the OIGs are their "eyes and ears" for learning what really is going on inside the government.
"The IG offices were set up to be independent and professional," says Bob Seldon, a lawyer in Washington with many clients in the IG community, "and waste and fraud in the federal government, like cronyism, back-scratching and double-dipping, undermine the purposes for which they were established."
OIG
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