Inspector General

Washington -- Congress should force the State and Defense departments to cooperate in planning and overseeing wartime reconstruction efforts to prevent the kinds of problems that fouled rebuilding efforts in Iraq, according a new investigative report being issued today. The failure of a comprehensive unified planning effort before the Iraq invasion, and shifting oversight of the reconstruction program after the invasion, hindered the United States' ability to effectively rebuild Iraq, according to a "lessons learned report" by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

In a troubling sign for the American-financed rebuilding program in Iraq, inspectors for a federal oversight agency have found that in a sampling of eight projects that the United States had declared successes, seven were no longer operating as designed because of plumbing and electrical failures, lack of proper maintenance, apparent looting and expensive equipment that lay idle. The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed.

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department's inspector general acknowledged yesterday that he was examining whether outgoing Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales made false or misleading statements to Congress about the National Security Agency's terrorist surveillance program, the fired U.S. attorneys affair and other subjects. Responding to a congressional query, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said that his office was investigating Gonzales' conduct as part of several ongoing probes into the activities of department lawyers on Gonzales' watch.

The Baltimore County Police Department is among 149 agencies whose use of federal funding intended to put more officers on the street is being questioned by the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Justice, officials said yesterday.The inspector general's report, made public this week, summarizes an extensive two-year audit completed last fall of how local police agencies used grants issued under the Violent Crime Control Act of 1994 -- part of President Clinton's promise to put 100,000 new officers on America's streets.

Property flipping and suspected mortgage fraud have produced a fertile field for federal investigators in Baltimore, setting off an expanding series of criminal probes.At least three agencies -- the FBI, postal inspectors and the inspector general of the Department of Housing and Urban Development -- are conducting investigations. Another dozen and a half possible targets have drawn their interest, sources say.The Maryland attorney general's office is in the early stages of an inquiry that could produce criminal as well as civil actions.

The case of a Baltimore drug lord who ordered executions from federal prison is a prime example of how inmates have run deadly criminal enterprises with unfettered access to telephones, a government inquiry has concluded.The Inspector General's Office, an investigative arm of the U.S. Justice Department, accused the Bureau of Prisons of "taking insufficient steps to address this abuse" despite being aware of widespread problems for years."A significant number of federal inmates use prison telephones to commit serious crimes while incarcerated, including murder, drug trafficking and fraud," Inspector General Michael R. Bromwich concluded.

WASHINGTON -- Taking the gloves off in an increasingly hostile confrontation, the chief investigator for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development accused its secretary, Andrew M. Cuomo, of "a series of attacks and dirty tricks" designed to force her resignation.Susan Gaffney, the inspector general, spoke at a Senate committee hearing yesterday, where she pleaded for help from Congress in fending off Cuomo's attempts to curb her independence, undermine her office's work and to begin conducting criminal investigations, a responsibility she now has.Appearing before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, she also charged that a Cuomo aide had sought "amnesty" from the Justice Department for the targets of a six-year investigation by her office into the spending of "millions and millions" of dollars in HUD funds.

Daniel P. Henson III, Baltimore's housing chief, suggested yesterday that racism might be behind a federal decision to investigate the spending of federal housing funds here."

The congressman who holds their purse strings accused federal housing officials yesterday of trying to derail a major fraud probe that temporarily targeted Baltimore and of attempting to discredit the chief investigator."

A major federal investigation of housing fraud in Baltimore -- delayed last spring by charges of racism -- has been revived and expanded to include the rest of Maryland. More than a half-dozen cities around the country also face scrutiny.While all of Maryland will be targeted, the investigation here is expected to focus on the troubled Baltimore housing agency that spends about $350 million a year, most of that money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.New Orleans and San Francisco, initially selected for investigation, have been dropped from the list, but other cities, including Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and Fort Worth-Dallas, have been added.

The embattled head of Baltimore's inspector general's office resigned Monday, days after city officials publicly criticized his department and the City Council slashed its funding. Hilton L. Green, 62, submitted his retirement papers and informed his staff of his departure, according to the city solicitor's office. Mayor Sheila Dixon appointed Green, a city housing inspector, to the $127,300-a-year post in February 2007. City officials said they will conduct a national search for a new inspector general, a watchdog position intended to root out fraud, waste and abuse in city government.

The City Council is right to question what Baltimore Inspector General Hilton L. Green has been up to for the last two years. His office gets $500,000 a year to root out corruption, yet he's only filed one annual report, which boils down to finding a few thousand dollars worth of misappropriated funds. With those resources, anyone who can't find more than that in a city government that's spent $4 billion during that time must not be looking very hard. Mr. Green says his office has tackled important issues not reflected by the statistics, among them allegations of cheating on Fire Department promotion exams and complaints about falsified parking tickets, and he has organized workshops on workplace violence for city employees.

With St. Joseph Medical Center under federal investigation, three top executives resigned Friday from the Towson hospital, including its longtime president and CEO, and its chief operating officer. The executives - CEO John K. Tolmie, COO Sly C. Moore, and Lucy Shamash, vice president of operations - have been on leave since February, when the hospital disclosed it was being investigated for its financial dealings with a physician group. At the time, the hospital said the executives were taking time off to avoid a conflict of interest amid the investigation.

Last October, in the early stages of a mad scramble to rescue the American economy from a financial heart attack, Congress gave the Treasury Department $750 billion to buy toxic securities from banks. From that not-so-paltry beginning, the rescue effort has evolved into 12 separate programs that cover up to $3 trillion in direct spending, loans and loan guarantees. The potential for waste, fraud and abuse is enormous, the man assigned to protect those trillions doesn't like what he sees, and we are glad he's on the job. Last week, Neil M. Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, said he has already opened 20 criminal investigations and six audits into whether tax dollars are being pilfered or wasted.

In the first major disclosure of corruption and fraud in the $750 billion federal bailout program, investigators said Monday that they have opened 20 criminal probes into possible securities fraud, tax law violations, insider trading and mortgage modification fraud. Neal Barofsky, the special inspector general overseeing the bailout program, said in an interview that the investigations are just the first wave of cases by his office. He expects the first criminal indictments to occur later this year.

Politics drove hiring at Justice, report says WASHINGTON: Ideological considerations permeated the hiring process at the Justice Department's civil rights division, where a politically appointed official sought to hire "real Americans" and Republicans for career posts and prominent case assignments, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday by the department's inspector general. The extensive study of hiring practices between 2001 and 2007 concluded that a former department official improperly weeded out candidates based on their perceived ties to liberal organizations.

Baltimore's inspector general must not have enough to do - or he's taken to impersonating a homicide detective. Someone at City Hall needs to remind Hilton Green that his primary responsibility is ferreting out government waste, fraud and abuse. Looking into the death of a well-known Baltimore contractor is a sizable stretch from his job description. Mr. Green has reportedly paid a visit to the state medical examiner's office in the matter of the May 16, 2005 death of Robert Lee Clay, who promoted minority business interests and their participation in government contracts.

Are we witnessing the end of capitalism? That's what you might think, based on the many voices now questioning the continued viability of the free market model that has provided our country with such abundance for well over two centuries. The strongest condemnations have concerned the unprecedented intrusiveness of the federal government's new role in the private sector and the ruinous dollar amount of the bailout package. These are legitimate concerns, but such criticisms must eventually give way to discussion about our path forward.

WASHINGTON - As U.S. attorney general Alberto R. Gonzales and his top deputy, Paul J. McNulty, "abdicated their responsibility" in the 2006 dismissals of nine federal prosecutors, were aloof and uninformed about the process, and offered the public reasons for the firings that were "inconsistent, misleading and or inaccurate," Justice Department investigators concluded yesterday. The authors of the long-awaited report, prepared by the Justice Department's Office of Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility, were unable to determine conclusively whether crimes were committed as part of the politically charged firings, and they called for further investigation, particularly into the role of the White House.

Baltimore's deputy transportation chief, Anthony P. Wallnofer Jr., resigned Tuesday, just days after the city inspector general completed an investigation into his relationship with a private towing company that bought a boat on his behalf at a city auction. Mr. Wallnofer was accused of violating departmental rules that he himself wrote prohibiting top agency officials from acquiring vehicles or vessels at city auctions. We fully agree with First Deputy Mayor Andrew Frank, who called Mr. Wallnofer's departure "the right decision."