In a prior Foundry post, we highlighted the egregious misconduct of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Office of Legal Enforcement in the prosecution of marine biologist Nancy Black. NOAA is criminally prosecuting her for bogus charges, including lying to investigators and feeding whales. These charges could land Black …
The chief watchdog for the Environmental Protection Agency has recommended that the agency recoup $9 million in grant funds given to an Oregon non-profit – the entirety of the award – citing uncompetitive procurement costs, shoddy financial management, and inadequate reporting of information to the federal government. EPA awarded the …
The Commerce Department’s inspector general will investigate whether an obscure agency within the department spent millions of dollars on an annual conference near Disney World in Florida. The agency has disputed those allegations, first brought by congressional Republicans on behalf of a whistleblower. If the whistleblowers’ numbers — contained in …
A stimulus program designed to create jobs by funding rural utility projects has created only about 12% of the jobs projected at the outset of the program in a sample of towns recently examined by the Agriculture Department’s Inspector General. The IG examined 22 local utilities and government agencies to receive …
A report from the Agriculture Department’s Inspector General has revealed some stunning examples of financial waste in the Department’s nascent technology security efforts, which have mismanaged about $63 million in taxpayer funding. Among the IG’s findings: the USDA spent more than $2 million on an internship program that only hired …
The Energy Department can’t figure out how hundreds of thousands of dollars in “green energy” stimulus money earmarked for manufacturing equipment was spent, according to a new report from the agency’s Inspector General. DOE’s IG stated in a July 2012 audit report that $500,000 of equipment bought with stimulus money to …
The Agriculture Department’s Rural Housing Service likely loaned hundreds of millions of dollars to ineligible borrowers as part of President Obama’s stimulus package, a report by federal watchdogs has revealed. The stimulus earmarked more than $1 billion for RHS home loans in rural communities. According to the Ag Department’s Inspector …
The Inspector General for the Environmental Protection Agency will begin an investigation into the consistency and fairness of the agency’s enforcement actions, according to a letter drafted on Friday. The IG will focus on EPA Region 7, which includes Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas. The investigation will address three questions, …
The Energy Department’s inspector general released a report recently highlighting the lack of financial oversight in the Department’s electric vehicle funding program. The report underscores problems with some of the program’s beneficiaries highlighted here at Scibe and under scrutiny by congressional investigators. The IG report focuses on DOE’s Transportation Electrification …
Less than a month from tax day, a pair of reports from federal watchdogs raises serious concerns about the Internal Revenue Service’s handling of sensitive and confidential taxpayer information. Potential security problems reportedly stem from inadequate measures to ensure the security of digital information, and from the IRS’s failure to …
