LiveWire

The following story is true.

Really, you just can’t make up stuff like this:

Via The Wall Street Journal: The ‘Spy” Who Fooled the EPA

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….

In 1989, John Beale applied for a job at the EPA, and wrote on his job application that he had worked for the Senate. Apparently, no one bothered to check his application. By 1994, he began claiming that he was a CIA operative. At first, he took off one day at a time, but he was soon gone from his desk job for longer periods, sometimes up to six months, for “undercover” CIA work, either at the Directorate of Operations in Langley, Md., or fighting the Taliban in Pakistan. (He was either lounging at home, or travelling to L.A. and staying at luxury hotels, which he did five times, at taxpayer expense, for a total of $57,000.)

He also claimed that he had contracted malaria in the jungles of Viet Nam, and got himself a handicapped parking spot in downtown DC, worth $18,000. (He was never in Viet Nam. Oh, and he never had malaria.)

An investigation by Louisiana Sen. David Vitter led to Beale’s recent sentencing of 32 months in prison.

The WSJ concludes:

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.

But, the story gets worse.

As reported in the Washington Post: EPA warned of ex-official’s illegal salary, bonuses in 2010, watchdog report says

And now this:

Via NY Post: NY audit finds public employees double-dipping

…it turns out you don’t need a fake CIA cover to pull a John Beale. According to a just-released audit by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli, New Yorkers, too, are getting hosed by some public employees.

The audit reviewed 345 workers at six state agencies and public authorities. It discovered that 75 held two public-sector jobs, lied about it on their timesheets and reaped double the pay.

“Dozens of public employees working for more than one public employer have managed to take advantage of lax oversight and take credit for hours they didn’t work,” DiNapoli said. “Our audits found supervisors were lax and often complicit in allowing employees to game the system.”

Like the nurse who claimed to work for both the state mental-health agency and a Bronx public school. Or the MTA track-equipment worker whose work schedule overlapped with his other job at the city Department of Environmental Protection….

Abuses happen in the private sector, too. The difference is that private companies have more incentive to stop it.

The moral of the story? The bigger the government, the bigger the opportunities for cheats.

With all this talk about John Beale, and thinking about all the abuse and fraud perpetrated by the Obama Regime (Benghazi, IRS, NSA, Obamacare etc.), I’m reminded of another Beale.

A fictitious one.

Howard Beale.

The movie “Network” was filmed almost 40 years ago.

A different time. A different set of circumstances.

But his words ring eerily true today:

Related:

Breitbart: U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM): $274 Million Paid to Dead Federal Retirees Since 2011