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An Arlington cemetery worker jailed for a $5,000 fraud has become the latest in a long line of Government employees exposed for filling their tanks on taxpayers' dollars.
Bobby Bennett Harris was handed a nine-day prison sentence and two years' supervised probation for buying £5,354 of fuel for his personal car with a staff card.
The court also ordered him to pay back the money and issued him with a $5,000 fine.
The case was brought after authorities noticed he had used a card assigned to an electric vehicle to put gasoline in his SUV.
The electric vehicle was part of the fleet at Arlington National Cemetery, where fallen U.S. war heroes have been buried since the American Civil War.
Arlington National Cemetery employee Bobby Bennett Harris was jailed for nine days and given two yea rs supervised probation for paying for £5,354 of fuel for his personal car with a staff card
Harris had been issued with two staff cards to pay for the fleet's fuel. He agreed to a plea deal with federal prosecutors in Virginia for theft of government property
Eric Radwick, special agent for the General Services Administration, told Watchdog.org that Harris using an 'electric' vehicle card for gas was 'an obvious sign [of fraud]'.
It is the latest in a long line of abuses of fleet cards after an NBC investigation revealed that $2.4million was recovered in 260 cases between 2010 and 2014 by the General Services Administration.
In March, a former Washington D.C. fire employee pleaded guilty to fraud for using a taxpayer-funded gas card to buy more than $2,600 in gasoline in his Jaguar and selling it to others at a reduced rate.
Staff assistant Terrell McCray, 31, was dismissed from his position shortly after his case was revealed in a February.
In 2011, a jury convicted Lanaire White, 38, of conspiring to steal almost $300,000 worth of gasoline he bought using fleet cards from the Fort Monroe Army base in Virginia. He was sentenced to six years in jail.
It is the latest in a long line of abuses after an NBC investigation revealed that $2.4million was recovered in 260 cases uncovered between 2010 and 2014 by the General Services Administration
The Watchdog.org review of fraudulent use of fleet cards showed 10 guilty pleas, one military discharge a nd one arrest in the past 11 months alone.
The thefts ranged from $976 to $24,000 and involved employees from a number of departments, including the Navy the Department of Homeland Security and the District of Columbia Fire and Emergency Services.
While some employees, like Bennett, used the cards to fill their personal vehicles, others sold the fuel to others in orchestrated scams.
'They'll start to arrange with people a time and place. They'll usually do this at a gas station, and they'll line up several people,' says Stuart Berman, who leads the GSA Inspector General's office in Chicago.
Officials believe that the full scale of theft could be much larger - with 590,385 gasoline purchase cards being used for the national fleet of 150,000 vehicles.
'Generally we don't catch (thieves) on the first tank,' said Radwick. < /p>
Source: How government workers are filling their tanks on the taxpayers' tab: Widespread fuel rip-off is exposed after Arlington cemetery worker is jailed for using his staff card for ...
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