Watchdogs at the Environmental Protection Agency may need more oversight themselves when it comes to hiring new staff.
The EPA’s office of inspector general doesn’t verify the information prospective employees put on their job applications and instead relies entirely on the potential hire to vouch for his or her entire work history, a report from the same office revealed.
In fact, the EPA inspector general, which employs a staff of 295, has no guidelines in place that require hiring officials to verify anything from a prospect’s résumé, including employment history and professional references.
“Once an applicant meets the minimum requirements and is considered eligible for the position, the office relies extensively on the applicant self-certifying the information they submitted on their résumé and application,” the report said.
The watchdog warned against the risk that accompanies hiring a new employee “based on misleading information” — a possibility under the present system. Its findings came one day after the inspector general released a report detailing flaws in the way it approved requests for overtime pay.
Jeff Lagda, spokesman for the EPA inspector general, told the Washington Examiner his office reviewed its own policies in an early step of fulfilling an August 2013 request by Sen. David Vitter, R-La., to examine the personnel practices of the entire agency.
“This recently-released report is actually part of an ongoing audit on the EPA’s employee vetting process,” Lagda said. “We expect to issue the final report on the agency by summer.”
Congress compelled the EPA watchdog to review its employment practices and those of the agency at large after a senior policy adviser stole nearly $1 million in pay and expenses while pretending to work for an EPA office.
John Beale was sentenced to 32 months in prison after the government discovered he had collected a paycheck and expenses from the EPA for years while claiming to work secretly for the CIA, which was a lie.
Between 2000 and 2013, Beale spent two and a half years off the job by telling co-workers and family he was a CIA operative and was also working on an EPA research project that was never completed. He even charged nearly $60,000 in travel costs to the agency for five unnecessary trips to Los Angeles that he took under the auspices of the phantom EPA project, according to the Justice Department.
Beale’s case drew attention to gaps in the EPA’s personnel practices and sparked a flurry of inquiries from both Congress and the agency’s own inspector general.
Vitter, who was then the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, pressed the inspector general to review internal policies and determine whether they had a hand in allowing Beale to defraud the EPA for $886,000 in payments that included a retention bonus designed to allow the agency to hang on to valuable employees.
Vitter slammed the watchdog for its initial handling of the Beale investigation in a series of letters to EPA Inspector General Arthur Elkins.
“Unfortunately, the [office of inspector general] has left too many questions unanswered, which leads me to suspect that your office has abandoned its obligation under the law to be independent from agency interference,” Vitter wrote in a February 2014 letter to Elkins in which he expressed his “grave concerns.”
Additional allegations of employee misconduct have emerged and sparked public outrage as the agency watchdog has dug further into EPA staff, such as in the case of an official who continued to collect a six-figure government paycheck after thousands of pornographic films were discovered on his work computer.
