Pubdate: Sun, 26 Jul 2015
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PA)
Copyright: 2015 PG Publishing Co., Inc.
Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/pm4R4dI4
Website: http://www.post-gazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/341
Note: Full DOJ report at: https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2015/a1528.pdf

OUT OF CONTROL

The DEA Overpays Informants Without Oversight

An audit released last week by the Department of Justice provides 
fresh evidence that the Drug Enforcement Administration needs a 
thorough retooling that goes beyond the replacement of its director.

The audit by the Office of the Inspector General concluded that the 
federal government paid informants millions of dollars and allowed 
them to buy and sell drugs with minimal oversight in a 
drug-enforcement program riddled with deficiencies.

It confirmed the disturbing revelations of a yearlong investigation 
by the Post-Gazette, which found the DEA paid informants at least 
$146 million over five years, informants acted on the DEA's behalf 
for decades and - perhaps most problematic - a disproportionate share 
of federal acquittals were attributable at least in part to problems 
with informants.

The DEA's former administrator, Michele Leonhart, retired in May in 
the wake of reports that her agents frolicked with prostitutes at 
parties financed by drug cartels. Her successor, Chuck Rosenberg, is 
a Justice Department veteran now tasked with a challenge: reforming 
an agency that appears to have scandalously lax control over its 
underground sources even as it supplemented their payments with 
legally dubious workers' compensation benefits.

One individual alone, the report said, collected more than $2 million 
from the government between 1997 and 2012, including a $1 million 
award for a drug bust, and $500 a week in workers' compensation. Nice 
work if you can get it, and even better if you can keep it, as many 
informants did, serving for decades even though Department of Justice 
guidelines urge careful review of anyone retained as an informant for 
more than six years.

The outrages continue. Some individuals were receiving workers' 
compensation even though they had not been injured on DEA jobs and, 
as independent contractors not government employees, were not 
entitled to the benefit. Families received benefits on behalf of 
people who died, even when the circumstances of the deaths were 
unclear. Informants were allowed to conduct drug deals below 
established amounts - 90 kilograms of heroin or 450 kilograms of 
cocaine, for example - without supervisory review, resulting in what 
one former DEA agent called "a free pass to commit crime."

The only good news about this deeply tarnished agency is that it 
already has new leadership in Mr. Rosenberg, who can get right to 
work implementing changes the inspector general's office recommended, 
among them strict adherence to policies that already exist.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom