Reuters reports:
The U.S. Treasury Department temporarily froze all recruitment by its anti-money laundering arm and forced the agency to rescind 11 job offers, after an investigation found it violated the federal employment code during an aggressive hiring push, according to several government officials.(ht Perianne Boring)
The Office of Personnel Management, a federal agency that governs labor practices in the government, determined that the Treasury's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FinCEN, illegally screened candidates in a quest to hire only lawyers for certain jobs, the officials said. It has recommended further investigations by two other federal agencies into FinCEN's practices, they added.
Rules for hiring at government agencies make it illegal to screen candidates for qualifications that aren't stipulated in the job description, and the jobs FinCEN had posted weren't designated as being only for lawyers, the officials said.
Some senior Treasury officials knew about FinCEN's practice but it was not halted until OPM identified the problem, two of the sources said. Treasury sent a memo to FinCEN suspending its hiring authority, one of the sources said.
Heat Map Of Corruption
ReplyDeleteSo, how does stuff get done in the US? I’d like to posit a radical idea—the US is just as corrupt as many of the red countries. It is just that corruption has matured a bit in the US—we no longer use cash—we trade favors and job appointments.
Here’s how American style corruption works; a regulator decides to impede something. The regulator has in-house lawyers and the businessman needs to hire his own lawyers. Millions get spent on legal fees by both sides. Eventually, the businessman hires someone very expensive with “senior agency experience” to advise him and the problem is rapidly “solved.”
In the example above, the government agency impeded a process so that former regulators can get cushy jobs in the private sector. The quid pro quo is that by agreeing to resolve the obstruction, the current regulators will get private sector jobs in the future, sometimes even at the same firm that they obstructed. We see this playing out all the time in the US. Just look at how incestuous the relationships are at various large businesses, which continue to hire former regulators and then watch as these people eventually cycle back into the much less lucrative regulatory world in order to refresh their relationships. Meanwhile, lower ranking regulators cycle between staffing at law firms and the regulatory world as they build up their resumes. Is it any wonder that the legal fees are so high in America? It’s a carrousel of corruption.
http://adventuresincapitalism.com/post/2014/05/05/Heat-Map-Of-Corruption.aspx