The FBI has not been paying their phone bills on time. Phone companies have cut off the FBI’s wiretaps used to listen in on suspected criminals, terrorists, and spies because they might find information from criminal’s phone calls.Robert Duncan, assistant professor of political science, thinks that the monitoring of the phone calls is unfair in the first place.
“The monitoring of phone calls is a violation of privacy,” Duncan said. “The Supreme Court said ‘Hey, George, your going out of regulation,’ but they are still monitoring phone calls going out of the country.”
However, with the discovery of the FBI not being able to pay their bills – more than half of 990 bills for telephone companies in five FBI offices were not paid on time – according to reports; in one of these offices, unpaid costs for wiretaps totaled in $66,000. The FBI has not responded to these reports.
The Department of Justice blamed this loss on the FBI’s loose oversight of money in undercover investigations. The Department of Justice said this is demonstrated in one agent stealing $25,000 from the FBI.
An audit also found out that a wiretap that was for use by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation “was halted due to untimely payment.”
The issue with the late payments is that evidence is getting lost as a result.
“We found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,” said Inspector General Glenn A. Fine to CNN News.
It has also become apparent that field offices are paying expenses that the FBI headquarters should be paying. In the 130 cases examined, auditors found 14 cases in which field offices, not the headquarters, had paid at least $6,000.
In the large part, the faulty bookkeeping of the FBI is to blame, according to CNN News. Demonstrated by the case in which one FBI agent stole $25,000 and plead guilty in June, the FBI seems to not be keeping their eyes out as carefully as they should.
“As demonstrated by the FBI employee who stole funds intended to support undercover activities procedural controls by themselves have not ensured proper tracking and use of confidential case funds,” said the audit report.
The audit also seemed suspicious of FBI agents because nearly half of these agents seem to have late loan payments or are bankrupt.
Fine also offered 16 recommendations on how to improve the FBI’s managing and tracking of funds. The FBI said it was working to solve the problem, and the FBI agreed to 11 of the suggestions. However, they said that the other four “would be either unfeasible or too cost prohibitive.”
Some people, like national security policy counsel for American Civil Liberties Union member, Michael German, find this an even bigger deal than just problems with payments. German calls this “management a threat to our national security”.
German said, “We’re down the constitutional rabbit hole when lack of payment, and not the lack of a warrant, prevents the FBI from wiretapping.