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Drug agency informants reap millions in federal comp benefits

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Drug agency informants reap millions in federal comp benefits

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been using federal workers comp benefits to pay informants for about 40 years without the appropriate oversight, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

An audit released Tuesday by the Office of the Inspector General reveals that the DEA paid 17 confidential sources or their dependents Federal Employees' Compensation Act benefits totaling more than $1 million from July, 1 2013, to June 30, 2014 alone. In some cases, the DEA has been paying federal workers comp since 1974.

While the Federal Employees' Compensation Act provides workers comp benefits to federal and U.S. postal service workers, a confidential source is someone who provides information to law enforcement agencies regarding felonious criminal activities, the report states, thus potentially falling outside the coverage.

The total historical cost is unknown, but it's clear “significant taxpayer dollars have been expended,” the report states.

“As a result of DEA's lack of substantive involvement and record-keeping, as well as the atypical manual process (the Department of Labor) told us that it used for these cases at the request of DEA, we could not specifically determine how much money each recipient had been paid in FECA benefits or if the payments to the confidential sources or their families were ongoing,” the report states.

The audit references one case in which a confidential source was shot and injured in 1984, “but there is no indication of where and how the shooting occurred.” In another case, a confidential source was allegedly killed overseas in 1991, but there were no witnesses and “the file contained no details describing how or why the DEA believed that the source was killed as a result of cooperation with the DEA,” according to the report.

The Office of the Inspector General said it initiated the audit as a result of “numerous allegations regarding the DEA's handling and use of confidential sources.”

The report states that a number of DEA officials were not aware that confidential sources were receiving Federal Employees' Compensation Act benefits. In addition, no formal standards or policies exist for determining the sources' “existing pay rate.”

“Given that the services that confidential sources provide to the DEA are often irregular, sporadic and unique in nature, the DEA's confidential sources are not paid standard amounts and there is a wide range of payments provided to confidential sources while they are active with the DEA,” the report states.

In one of the cases included in the report, a confidential source was killed in July 1989 and his surviving family received Federal Employees' Compensation Act payments of $4,287 every four weeks. By the time of his wife's death in 2012, the payment amount had increased to $6,311. The report states that this person's family alone received more than $1.3 million in benefits.

The Office of the Inspector General said it “will continue to audit the DEA's Confidential Source Program to more fully assess the DEA's management and oversight of its confidential sources.”

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