Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives cops are seen in Uvalde, Texas, May 25, 2022.
Chandan Khanna | AFP | Getty Images
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for years illegally overpaid as much as $20 million to agents and investigators who worked in non-law enforcement positions by misclassifying them as law enforcement posts, a government investigator said Tuesday.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which disclosed the mismanagement, said it had alerted President Joe Biden and Congress of “substantial waste, mismanagement and illegal employment practices” involving high-level jobs at ATF.
The U.S. Office of Special Counsel said that in a five-year period that officials investigated, 108 ATF employees who worked in non-law enforcement jobs “were improperly provided Law Enforcement Availability Pay (LEAP) and enhanced retirement advantages.”
The $20 million or so found to have been overpaid “might be much higher provided that the illegal job classifications had been common practice at ATF far longer than the five-year timeframe reviewed by investigators,” OSC said. That timeframe was 2016 through 2021.
ATF’s media affairs office had no immediate comment on the OSC report when contacted by CNBC. In its official response to OSC, ATF contested claims concerning the designation of a number of the positions being misclassified.
The investigation was sparked by two whistleblowers in ATF’s human resources department who alerted officials about that practice involving “gross waste of funds” and “gross mismanagement,” OSC’s letter to Biden said.
The letter said that the whistleblowers claimed the agency had a long-standing policy of helping the careers of special agents and industry operations investigators by systematically misclassifying high-level non-law enforcement jobs and filling “these coveted, primarily supervisory jobs with only special agents” or those varieties of investigators.
After OSC verified the claims, the watchdog referred the allegations to ATF, which as an alternative of conducting an internal investigation, deferred to a then-pending audit by the Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal civil service.
OPM later concluded that ATF’s leadership “demonstrated disregard for the rule of law and regulations” governing federal management policies and practices.
In consequence of that conclusion, OPM has for now suspended ATF’s power to categorise its own employees as being in federal law enforcement positions “until matters are resolved to OPM’s satisfaction,” the letter to Biden said. ATF can be within the technique of updating the descriptions of assorted positions to reflect their actual job duties.
Fifty of the staff who held positions that were misclassified have either been reassigned or retired, the letter said.
“I thank the whistleblowers for coming forward with these very serious allegations and am pleased that under OPM’s oversight, ATF has initiated corrective measures,” said Special Counsel Henry Kerner in a press release.
“While I find the report back to be reasonable, progress toward full resolution has been slow, which could also be attributable to the long-standing nature of the issues and the entrenched culture reinforcing ATF’s practices,” Kerner said.
“I’m pleased that OPM continues to watch progress in implementing required corrective actions, and I urge ATF’s internal affairs to carry the responsible parties accountable,” he said.
Nevertheless, within the letter to Biden, Kerner noted that the whistleblowers who first complained concerning the practice imagine “that the report didn’t adequately capture the extent of ATF’s illegal practices or the complete impact of the harm.”
Kerner wrote that the whistleblowers imagine there have been many more misclassified positions than those detailed in OPM’s audit, and that ATF “significantly underreported” the waste as a result of the misclassifications of positions.
“Furthermore, they identified that the agency didn’t account for the impact of the wrongdoing
on the agency’s non‐law enforcement employees,” Kerner wrote.
“Finally, the whistleblowers indicated that ATF has not adequately corrected the wrongdoing, asserting that employees proceed to carry positions for which they’re unqualified and that it’s legally unsupportable to waive the debts incurred by employees who improperly received LEAP.”
