Shameful: 263 government employees stayed home for three years and you paid their check...

#Taxes #TheSimpsons hahaha pic.twitter.com/H10z6GH7uT
— Daniela Vargas (@danivg2188) August 17, 2014

I am wondering why half of Americans even bother to go to work and pay taxes. The other half has already given up. 

Via Washington Examiner:

The federal government has shelled out more than $700 million in paid leave to more than 57,000 employees who were home from work for time periods stretching from one month to three years, a Government Accountability Office report has found.
In a 62-page report published Monday, the GAO analyzed why so many federal employees were home and getting paid for such long periods of time and they discovered a variety of reasons.
In many cases, employees were home awaiting the outcome of investigations into alleged misconduct and criminal actions. Some racked up paid leave for “physical fitness activities,” and others were away from work seeking professional development. Employees also took paid leave for “recuperation” from overseas work.
Hundreds of federal employees remained at home, collecting a paycheck, for years.
The report found that during a three-year period beginning in 2011, 263 employees remained on paid leave for one to three years at a cost of $31 million.
Keep on reading…

Federal Government spending $1 million to monitor your suspicious memes on Twitter

Guess who is a warmonger now. pic.twitter.com/yDdOc1uokr
— Howard Notelling (@BluegrassPundit) August 8, 2014

Wonderful...

Via WFB:

The federal government is spending nearly $1 million to create an online database that will track “misinformation” and hate speech on Twitter.
The National Science Foundation is financing the creation of a web service that will monitor “suspicious memes” and what it considers “false and misleading ideas,” with a major focus on political activity online.
The “Truthy” database, created by researchers at Indiana University, is designed to “detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution.”
The university has received $919,917 so far for the project.
“The project stands to benefit both the research community and the public significantly,” the grant states. “Our data will be made available via [application programming interfaces] APIs and include information on meme propagation networks, statistical data, and relevant user and content features.”

Federal Government lost track of $619 billion...

I am sure it wasn't wasted. (snark)

USA Today:

And the data that does exist is wildly inaccurate, according to the Government Accountability Office, which looked at 2012 spending data. Only 2% to 7% of spending data onUSASpending.gov is "fully consistent with agencies' records," according to the report.

Among the data missing from the 6-year-old federal website:

• The Department of Health and Human Services failed to report nearly $544 billion, mostly in direct assistance programs like Medicare. The department admitted that it should have reported aggregate numbers of spending on those programs.

• The Department of the Interior did not report spending for 163 of its 265 assistance programs because, the department said, its accounting systems were not compatible with the data formats required by USASpending.gov. The result: $5.3 billion in spending missing from the website.

• The White House itself failed to report any of the programs it's directly responsible for. At the Office of National Drug Control Policy, which is part of the White House, officials said they thought HHS was responsible for reporting their spending.

For more than 22% of federal awards, the spending website literally doesn't know where the money went. The "place of performance" of federal contracts was most likely to be wrong.

That's a problem, said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

"We live in a world in which information drives decisions," Carper said. "And, given the budget constraints that our government faces, we need reliable information on how and where our money is being spent."