Saturday, August 16, 2014

ObamaWASTE: DEA paid Amtrak insider $854,460 for Data they could have Obtained Free

The Drug Enforcement Administration paid an Amtrak employee hundreds of thousands of dollars over two decades to obtain confidential information it could have gotten for free, according to internal investigators at the railroad.
According to a report released Monday by Amtrak's inspector general, the DEA paid an Amtrak secretary $854,460 to be an informant. The employee was not publicly identified except as a "secretary to a train and engine crew."
Amtrak's own police agency is already in a joint drug enforcement task force that includes the DEA. According to the inspector general, that task force can obtain Amtrak confidential passenger reservation information at no cost.
The office of Amtrak Inspector General Tom Howard declined to identify the secretary or say why it took so long to uncover the payments. Howard's report on the incident suggested policy changes and "other measures to address control weaknesses that Amtrak management is considering." DEA spokeswoman Dawn Dearden declined to comment.
[...]
...The report said the secretary was allowed to retire, rather than face administrative discipline, after the discovery that the employee had "regularly" sold private passenger information since 1995 without Amtrak's approval, said the IG's summary.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the $854,460 an unnecessary expense and asked for further information about the incident in a letter he released Monday to DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart. Grassley said the incident "raises some serious questions about the DEA's practices and damages its credibility to cooperate with other law enforcement agencies."...
Read the Full story HERE.

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