Wasteful Spending In Washington

On Saturday, Just the News awarded its Golden Horseshoe award to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. This is the organization that was created by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to protect pension benefits and is responsible for more than 34 million workers and retiree pension plans.

The article reports:

This week’s Golden Horseshoe award goes to the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. (PBGC), the nation’s pension bailout agency that is still reeling from revelations its chief of contracting engaged in a bribery scheme that steered $4.8 million in fraudulent business to a vendor in return for more than $1 million in personal benefits.

The bribery scheme involving the now convicted director of PBGC’s Procurement Department was possible because the agency suffered from several vulnerabilities, including reduced competition among vendors, missing legal reviews and sole-source contracts that evaded bidding designed to get taxpayers the best bargain, the PBGC’s inspector general reported.

“His actions were enabled by internal control weaknesses; specifically, inadequate oversight of PD procurements and a lack of a control mechanism to ensure that PD sent all requisite contract actions for legal review,” the inspector general reported. “Although PBGC began requiring that more contract actions receive legal review after the PD Director resigned in February 2020, it does not have a mechanism to ensure PD complies with this requirement.”

The internal watchdog said it also found “internal control deficiencies allowed PD to avoid competition requirements when awarding five other contracts, three of which were for PD support. Four of the contracts were awarded on a sole-source basis, including three using small business set-aside programs.”

The weaknesses are particularly concerning because PBGC, which normal funds itself through insurance payments from employer pension plans, just received its first ever infusion of tax dollars to replenish coffers that were on track to be insolvent by 2026, the IG noted. 

Please follow the link above to read the details. This is disgusting. The amount of fraud is disgusting and the fact that our tax dollars were used to fund this agency to allow further fraud is even worse. Our tax dollars at work.