Report: National Weather Service misappropriated $43 million
Jack Hayes, the director of the National Weather Service, stepped down Friday in response to an investigation that top officials at the weather service had misappropriated $43.8 million by giving bonuses and extensions to contractors without proper justification.
The Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Commerce, which oversees NOAA, released the report on May 18, detailing an audit of nine contracts that include incentive pay for good work. The contracts have a maximum potential value of $1.6 billion.
The investigators said there may be other contracts that provide additional awards from 2008, 2009 and 2010 but that NOAA was unable to “provide a complete and reliable list when requested by the Office of Inspector General.”
Sen. Olympia Snowe, the ranking member of Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard subcommittee, released a statement Friday, the same day Hayes that stepped down and a week after the report had been released.
Full story at MSNBC.com h/t to Ryan Maue
Why am I not surprised?
All those running organisations like this, particularly if they have a “climate” remit, have their sticky fingers in the cookie jar.
Not to mention their snouts in the trough.
Note there were two separate issues:
1) Lack of justification/documentation for contract award fees
2) Reprogramming of funds in program accounts towards the forecast offices
#2 seemed to be the proximate cause of Hayes’ retirement. Sounds to me at first read that Hayes was trying to keep the lights on and forecasts going out at the WSFOs by shifting money within his existing budgets. The problem is there are certain limits and “mother, may I” procedures required to do so.
The MSNBC story had an important update and clarification:
http://usnews.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/27/11910049-national-weather-service-chief-steps-down-after-probe-finds-agency-misappropriated-money?lite
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to clarify that there were two separate reports – an internal inquiry into alleged misappropriation of funds at the National Weather Service and an external inspector general’s report into alleged misappropriation at NOAA.
Unshackle the Weather Service from NOAA, fund it in its own right for Meteorological purposes only. Root out those with any other agenda and institute transparency in audit procedures and guidelines, once that is accomplished use that re-organisation as a “model” to clean up NOAA and GISS.
The whole Climate fiasco has such a stench for so long that it requires new broom treatment to sweep it clean, just as one would excise a cancer that threatens the health of the human body.
But the whole process must be open and subject to scrutiny to ensure the same scum doesn’t remain at the top to corrupt the process once again. Remove those with political agenda, audit all levels with a transparency, publish procedures and data, insist on open audit and operating controls.
Good governance!
Yes indeed. We must worry about how Ann Romney spends her husbands hard earned money.. We must not worry about how they spend “our” money.
j molloy says:
May 28, 2012 at 12:03 pm
I may be the only commentor here who left school when I was 16 but isn’t missapropreation just a fancy political word for stealing ?
_______________________________
Yes.
If it is some poor smuck caught stealing a candy bar or a car, he gets tossed in the slammer. If it is a bureaucrat, he gets shuffled to another department or if worse comes to worse he goes to work for a lobbyist. So do not be surprise to hear Jack Hayes landed himself a nice job with some lobbyist or NGO.
DesertYote says:
May 28, 2012 at 10:31 am
I saw this first hand. I was accused of illegally having test fixturing on my bench (that I was constructing!!!) because my documentation did not conform to a standard that was published that morning. The auditor was literally screaming at me! The who point was to cause as much fear and disruption as possible. Coincidentally at the very same time, someone was feeding stories to the paper with bogus claims of environmental damage being caused by the facility I worked at. This contamination story was (last time I checked a few years ago) one of only three or four facts listed for my former company on wiki, even though it is a very obscure story concerning a very small facility of a corporation with thousands of facilities. And the wiki gatekeepers were guarding this narrative jealously as I found out when I tried to correct the misrepresentation. The response I got was within a minute of my changes. (Go WIKI) It was pretty obvious that my organization was being attacked by lefties. Other republican supporting, conservative organization across the industry where experiencing the very same thing, while democrat supporting lefty organizations, who got caught selling secrets to our enemies, where left alone.
i have found this to be true also. there are wiki nazis that apparently monitor pages on there 24/7 and you just have to wonder who is paying them? are they gov’t employees wasting time on the internet or stooges of Soros?
Considering that right now the NWS is complaining about budget cuts and how it will hamper the important service it provides, it appears that this revelation couldn’t have come at a worse time.
Ah, this article and report is dead wrong and seriously needs to be fixed. Most of the resulting comments are screwed as a result.
Friday, DOC IG released a report about NOAA (NWS’s parent organization) contractor problems. ALSO Friday, NOAA administrator Dr. Jane L. announced a DIFFERENT investigation showed that NWS spent money that Congress had allocated for program “A” on program “Z.” Some might say the money was diverted to keep core operations running (and thus saving lives and property), but nonetheless, things like IT, software development and other things were impacted. In the process, NWS played a shell game of moving money between accounts to hid the resulting shortfall that built up over several years.
Now NWS has a ~$70m shortfall and if not fixed, NWS employees will have to deal with up to three weeks of furlough this fall unless somebody finds $30m to cover payroll.
Hayes was sacked for the NWS shell game, not the NOAA contractor problem.
PLEASE GET THIS RIGHT AND FIX IT.
I have to say this doesn’t seem like much to me either.
I was working on a Fed budget system of about a third of a billion.
I was rather distressed that I could not account for about $7 million when I summed up all the records of awards/contracts for the last year.
They were impressed that I was able to get the accuracy to almost 98%.
Different perspectives…
Consider that over a $3.6 trillion budget and even 2% lost is 72 billion.
And I’m sure there are areas where it is a lot worse.
The departure of Hayes is a different issue from the IG report linked in the post. The Hayes departure was a result of reprogramming w/o Congressional approval (anything reprogrammed over $120k must get approval) and NWS was moving funds in order to keep critical staff at NWS offices.
The IG report linked has to do with lax evaluation of contract performance, mostly in NESDIS, a line office separate from NWS. Please fix your link.