The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives intentionally overstated the duties of dozens of employees, labeling them as law enforcement agents so it could pay them more money, costing the government tens of millions of dollars.
Investigators said the overpayments have been going on since at least 2003. They identified more than 100 jobs in human resources and other administrative areas that were misclassified as criminal investigators.
But the employees won’t be asked to pay back any of their unearned money. ATF has decided to waive the debt, arguing the employees themselves acted in “good faith.” Investigators said the overpayments were intentional and blamed leaders at ATF, which is part of the Justice Department.Mr. Kerner said ATF’s internal affairs division is investigating how the illegal policy was adopted, and he hoped those involved will face consequences.
Two whistleblowers came forward to say ATF had been cooking its books to upgrade some positions to law enforcement jobs, even though the jobs didn’t need those skills. The whistleblowers said the ATF would only recruit and hire applicants with law enforcement credentials for those jobs. ATF self-reported another 17 positions, though it also disagreed with 30 of the positions that OPM flagged, saying those jobs actually did need law enforcement skills but the job descriptions had never been updated to reflect that.
The suspension remains in effect and OPM is still worried about how slow ATF is moving to unwind the situation, the special counsel said.ATF blamed its slow progress in cleaning up the mess on the complexity and length of the classification problem.Using ATF’s calculation of 70 wrongly classified positions, the overpayments for the last five years totaled about $10 million. Using OPM’s total of more than 100 positions, the overpayment surges to nearly $20 million.
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