Senator slams Treasury IG for not firing cheating investigators

A senior senator is charging the Treasury Department's top watchdog with dragging his feet in firing two senior subordinates put on leave for improperly taking transit fare subsidies and interfering with investigations.

In a recent floor speech and a statement Monday, Senate Finance Committee ranking member Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said acting Treasury Department Inspector General Dennis Schindel is moving too slowly in dealing with findings of misconduct against two senior officials in his office, the assistant inspector general for investigations and his deputy.

Both have been on administrative leave since February.

"I'm disappointed we haven't heard from the inspector general's office that this issue has been resolved," Grassley said Monday.

An investigation by the Labor Department's inspector general's office, which conducted the probe to assure independence, found that the top two officials in the Treasury IG's Office of Investigations violated the rules of the government's public transit subsidy program, which provides transit fare cards to government employees who use public transportation.

The officials, whose names have been redacted, are accused of taking the subsidies despite carpooling to work with other agents. Program rules require employees to affirm they use the cards to commute rather than selling them or using them elsewhere.

A GAO report last year found widespread abuse of the transit system among federal employees, but Grassley said violations by Treasury IG agents are more serious because the officials investigate and prosecute other department employees who abuse the program.

"IGs must live by the rules they enforce," Grassley said, noting other employees have been fired for accepting the subsidies improperly.

The Labor Department IG found the two officials urged a subordinate to dismiss a case against a federal employee who similarly violated the program's rules. The report suggests the officials dismissed the case due to their violations.

Richard Delmar, counsel to the Treasury IG, said "we are getting to the end of the process as quickly as we can while doing a credible and fair job."

Delmar said that, after reviewing the Labor Department IG's final report in January, his office did "supplementary investigations" due to gaps in the Labor Department IG report. Though it delayed action, that work was needed to defend any future disciplinary action, Delmar said.

While declining to discuss details, Delmar said a continuing investigation into new allegations may affect the case against the two officials. Asked about a letter to Grassley in which Schindel said the Labor IG report had not showed "corruption, criminal activity or serious wrongdoing," Delmar said the case has grown more serious.

"Early on, we had been under the impression that the results of the investigation were not going to be … as significant as they turned out to be," he said.

The two officials used poor judgment in reinvestigating a finding by an outside agency that one of their subordinates made illegal traffic stops using a government vehicle and lied about it during the investigation, the Labor IG's report found.

The report said the only purpose of the new probe was to remove the charge of making false statements, which could be used to attack the credibility of the agent's testimony against suspects in court.