The cost for employee misconduct investigations in at least one federal government agency increased sixfold in the past year–largely the result of government employees using their work issued computers to access pornography.
The inspector general at the National Science Foundation (NSF), which is a taxpayer funded foundation that provides billions of dollars in scientific research grants, was forced to cut back on its primary mission of investigation grant fraud and recovering misspent tax dollars to focus on the porn issue.
Amongst the offenders was one senior executive that spent at least some time looking at porn and chatting online with strippers on at least 331 days. Assuming that’s over the course of the year, that means he was putting in some significant overtime. The cost to the taxpayers? Somewhere between $14,000 and $58,000 (way to narrow that down a bit, guys).
When caught, the official promptly retired–and offered up a humanitarian defense, claiming that he “frequented the porn sites to provide a living to the poor overseas women.”
Of 10 NSF employee misconduct cases closed in 2008, seven of them involved employees accessing porn online–and those numbers don’t include active cases.
One would have to wonder if similar investigations in other government offices would net similar results–although I would guess most politicians are far too busy to spend time looking at porn.
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