Employees of the federal government already are better paid than their counterparts in the private sector, notwithstanding the government’s huge deficits and America’s crushing national debt of over $16 trillion.
Total wages and benefits paid to executive branch’s 2.1 million civilian workers amounted to $236 billion in 2011. Those wages, of course, come not from government but from taxpayers, whose taxes keep increasing because of the persistent and growing government deficits.
Despite the continuing recession, however, during the last decade, compensation of federal employees rose much faster than compensation of private-sector employees. As a consequence, the average federal civilian worker now earns twice as much in wages and benefits as the average worker in the U.S. private sector. A recent job-to-job comparison found that federal workers earned higher wages than did private-sector workers in four-fifths of the occupations examined.
Now we discover employees in at least one federal bureaucracy — the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) — are abusing their privileges, using their government-issued smart phones to view child porn, share nude pictures, and for sexting.
Kristen Andersen reports for LifeSiteNews, Feb. 22, 2013, that an internal report by the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) details a “rash of sexting cases” among agency employees using government-issued phones and computers.
Not meant for public dissemination, the 8-page memo was sent to all FBI employees as the October 2012 edition of the OPR’s quarterly all-employee email from Candice M. Will, the assistant director of the OPR.
Will described the memo as a sort of tutorial in “what not to do.” As she put it: “We’re hoping that getting the message out in the quarterlies is going to teach people, as well as their supervisors…you can’t do this stuff. When you are given an FBI BlackBerry, it’s for official use. It’s not to text the woman in another office who you found attractive or to send a picture of yourself in a state of undress.”
The memo details dozens of violations of policy within the FBI, whose motto is “Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.” Those violations include improper handling of evidence, driving under the influence, shoplifting, time and attendance fraud, as well as the following raunchy misuses of their government-issued phones:
- Viewing child porn: One FBI employee was fired after being caught in a child porn sting and admitting to buying and viewing DVDs of naked boys.
- Sending naked photos: One employee was suspended for e-mailing naked photos of herself to her ex-boyfriend’s wife. Another woman was suspended for more than a week for sending naked photos of herself to other employees – which, according to the report, “adversely affected the daily activities of several squads.”
- Sexting: One FBI “employee used [a] government-issued Blackberry to send sexually explicit messages to another employee. In mitigation, Employee accepted responsibility and expressed remorse.” The complaint noted the employee’s “conduct was repeated, intentional, and occurred during work hours.”
Between 2010 and 2012, the FBI took disciplinary action against more than 1,000 employees for a variety of violations, but only 85 were fired.
~Eowyn
