Your Tax Dollars at Work

It sounds like FEMA is still doing a heckuva job.

Houston divorce lawyer Mark Lipkin says he can't recall anyone paying for his services with a FEMA debit card, but congressional investigators say one of his clients did just that.

The $1,000 payment was just one example cited in an audit that concluded that up to $1.4 billion - perhaps as much as 16 percent of the billions of dollars in assistance expended after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita - was spent for bogus reasons.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency also was hoodwinked to pay for season football tickets, a tropical vacation and a sex change operation, the audit found. Prison inmates, a supposed victim who used a New Orleans cemetery for a home address and a person who spent 70 days at a Hawaiian hotel all were able to get taxpayer help, according to evidence that gives a new black eye to the nation's disaster relief agency.

[...]

Among the items purchased with the cards:

An all-inclusive, one-week Caribbean vacation in the Punta Cana resort in the Dominican Republic.

Five season tickets to New Orleans Saints professional football games.

Adult erotica products in Houston and "Girls Gone Wild" videos in Santa Monica, Calif.

Dom Perignon champagne and other alcoholic beverages in San Antonio.

"Our forensic audit and investigative work showed that improper and potentially fraudulent payments occurred mainly because FEMA did not validate the identity of the registrant, the physical location of the damaged address, and ownership and occupancy of all registrants at the time of registration," GAO officials said.

It's human nature that where's there's a catastrophe, there's going to be someone with a scheme to take advantage of it. And it goes without saying that the real crime here isn't just the fraud, it's that people who really needed the money didn't get it. But a sex-change operation? Just how do you fill out a requisition and a purchase order for a FEMA-approved addadicktome?

Forget it... I don't want to know.