WASHINGTON, DC - Federal officials failed to keep track of how they doled out millions of dollars in transit benefits paid for Washington-area Pentagon employees to get to and from work, resulting in overpayments, double dipping and questionable public transit fares, a recent Pentagon review has found.
The increasingly generous subsidy, expected to cost about $60 million this year, pays workers to take mass transit or join van pools to help unclog the notoriously traffic-snarled roadways in and around the nation's capital.
With the passage of the economic stimulus package last year, area federal workers across government saw their maximum transit subsidy rise from $120 per month to $230 per month.
But after reviewing a sampling of the more than 41,000 Pentagon workers who collected transit money in 2007 alone, the Pentagon's office of inspector general recently reported on numerous problems.
Hundreds of workers, for instance, appeared to be double dipping by collecting public transit subsidies for bus or train fares at the same time they received parking benefits. And records for more than 30,000 workers in the transit-subsidy program were incomplete or inaccurate, according to the review.
The inspector general's office declined Monday to comment on the report, and e-mails and telephone calls to the Washington Headquarters Services, the Pentagon agency that oversees the transit program, were not returned by deadline.
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