FEMA fraud paid for football, vacations, erotica

AP - WASHINGTON - The government doled out as much as $1.4 billion in bogus assistance to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, getting hoodwinked to pay for season football tickets, a tropical vacation and even a divorce lawyer, congressional investigators have found.

Prison inmates, a supposed victim who used a New Orleans cemetery for a home address, and a person who spent 70 days at a Hawaiian hotel all were able to wrongly get taxpayer help, according to evidence that gives a new black eye to the nation’s disaster relief agency.

Federal investigators even informed Congress that one man apparently used FEMA assistance money for a sex change operation.

Agents from the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, went undercover to expose the ease of receiving disaster expense checks from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The GAO concluded that as much as 16 percent of the billions of dollars in FEMA help to individuals after the two hurricanes was unwarranted.

-snip-

FEMA said it has identified more than 1,500 cases of potential fraud after Katrina and Rita and has referred those cases to the Homeland Security inspector general. The agency said it has identified $16.8 million in improperly awarded disaster relief money and has started efforts to collect the money.

The GAO said it was 95 percent confident that improper and potentially fraudulent payments were much higher — between $600 million and $1.4 billion

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13310790/

What has this administration done right since they took hold of power? Can anyone name one friggin' thing they have handled properly? I can't think of one.

FEMA once was one of the best run agencies in the federal government. Well it is a liberal department, created to ensure the welfare of Americans in times of disaster, so of course they want it to be a big failure. That way they can get rid of it altogether somewhere down the road.

:grr:

A great chance to get rid of non-whites (and blame it on gays), and a fabulous chance for the various ShrubCo subsidiaries, esp. Halliburton, to cash in. Of course, we are not hearing of the fraud that the subsidiaries are committing.

in their dealings with private contractors like Halliburton.
Notice how when there's fraud in a program designed to help individuals it's used as an excuse to get rid of these types of programs and when it's an abuse by government contractors then it's only a few bad apples.

They always make it seem like the biggest problems are with the low-level criminal element attempting to defraud the government. That's just because those people aren't personal friends of Dick Cheney and Co.