Metro No-Check

Federal employees freely committing fraud

YOU MIGHT buy your Metro Farecard with cash at a station. Others prefer to have money deducted from their paychecks and loaded onto SmarTrip cards. And then there are those who pay for their rides on eBay.

The Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday that federal employees are scamming a program intended to finance their commutes -- provided they take public transportation. The idea is to promote train and bus use, a not insignificant goal in a region with many thousands of federal employees who could otherwise tie up roads and dirty the air. Instead, the program has become a pot of free money for the enterprising but ethically challenged federal bureaucrat.

Take the example of an employee at the Transportation Department who sold his unused transportation vouchers -- known as Metrocheks in Washington -- on eBay for $1,080. Or the case of an Internal Revenue Service worker who sold $930 worth of Metrocheks while simultaneously claiming a free parking space at work. The GAO estimates that federal staffers in the Washington region illicitly pocket at least $17 million a year by abusing the program.

Not that their employers would have appreciated the scale of the problem if the GAO hadn't told them about it. The Treasury Department alone handed out vouchers to 25 people who never worked there, the GAO reported. Individual Metrocheks don't identify which agency issued them, and anyone can slide them through Metro's fare machines. And considering that administrative checks are apparently lax enough to allow employees to keep free parking spaces and still claim significant Metro subsidies, some federal agencies clearly don't do enough to prevent abuse.

Encouragingly, Metro plans to eliminate Metrocheks by 2008 in favor of SmarTrip cards, which are not as easily transferable. But that will not eliminate fraud. Among other things, Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who chairs the subcommittee that received the GAO's testimony Tuesday, suggested that transit program coordinators ensure that beneficiaries are actually employed at their agencies. Sen. Norm Coleman (Minn.), the subcommittee's ranking Republican and the lawmaker who initiated the GAO investigation, advised that program administrators be notified when beneficiaries leave agencies. The Transportation Department's inspector general said supervisors should check to see whether the amount of transit money employees ask for is reasonable. Such easy measures should have been in place long ago. Eliminating the program altogether, however, would be too rash and detrimental to everyone in the region.

As for those who illegally profited by selling their Metrocheks? At the least, they should have to pay back what they stole.