The FBI and nine other federal agencies are targeting government corruption in Northern Virginia, an initiative spurred by the glut of federal dollars flowing into the region.
The group, composed of law enforcement and inspector general offices, will investigate federal, state and local corruption and fraud through a task force, and will rely partly on information from the public to ferret out the crimes. Its reach includes Washington’s inner suburbs and extends as far as Loudoun and Fauquier counties.
“The region has the largest amount of federal dollars of any other region in the United States,” Joseph Persichini Jr., assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office, said at a Wednesday news conference. “$97 billion comes to the national capital region, about $47 billion is homeland security contracts.”
The task force does not believe Northern Virginia has a systemic problem of government corruption, Persichini said. Instead, officials concluded after an assessment of the region that “it’s reasonable to believe that if a high amount of dollars is coming into the region, that’s opportunity.”
For example, Northern Virginia has been given millions of dollars in homeland security grants since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks because of the region’s proximity to the nation’s capital, which has been used largely to boost first responders’ ability to respond to a widespread emergency. The task force will target misuse of the grant money, said Joseph Gaudiano, special agent in charge of the Homeland Security Office of the inspector general’s Washington Field Office.
“We believe that most of the grantees have processes in place to detect fraud and control fraud,” Gaudiano said. “With that much money moving through the area, there is always the possibility that some of that is diverted or misspent.”
The team includes inspector general staff from the Department of Transportation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Department of Housing and Urban Development, Department of Homeland Security, Internal Revenue Service, Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Postal Service, Small Business Administration and Department of Education.
