More than $22 million worth of scientific equipment and other items is missing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, raising "troubling issues" about the Atlanta-based agency's ability to manage its property, according to members of a congressional oversight committee.
U.S. Reps. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Ed Whitfield, R-Ky., Tuesday asked for an inspector general's audit of CDC's property management.
Among their concerns is a suspected "insider" burglary of $500,000 in new computers, according to a letter they sent to the inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
"The scope of property mismanagement and outright theft at CDC is both astonishing and baffling," Barton said in a statement to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "Absent laptops are hardly unique to CDC, but the centers may just have the worst record in the federal government for vanishing computers."
CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said Tuesday the agency is working to address its property control issues.
"There is no question that an agency with 15,000 staff presents unique challenges when it comes to property accountability and identification," he said. "We have some real issues to address and it's a work in progress."
Barton is the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which has oversight authority over federal agencies. Whitfield is the ranking Republican on the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
In October, the congressmen asked CDC to provide them with information about the agency's accountability for its property.
"In response to this inquiry, the CDC produced some records and information that raise troubling issues about its property management," the congressmen wrote in their letter Tuesday to Daniel Levinson, inspector general of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. HHS is CDC's parent agency.
Among the concerns Barton and Whitfield cited in their letter:
• There were 5,547 items of property, worth more than $22 million, unaccounted for at CDC as of Feb. 22, 2007.
• More than 1,300 missing property reports were filed with the agency during fiscal years 1995-2006, including more than $2 million in stolen and unrecovered property.
• CDC has conducted 61 investigations into the theft or disappearance of agency property during fiscal years 2004-2006. But the agency has no information on any arrests or convictions resulting from various investigations.
• About $500,000 in CDC property, including new and unopened Dell and Compaq computers, were stolen during a particularly brazen burglary at a CDC warehouse in 2002 where steel doors were cut to loot computers and other items, the letter said.
• "It has been alleged that the security systems were bypassed because of insider knowledge of the locations of sensors and cameras," the letter said.
While CDC told the congressmen that the property wasn't recovered, "Committee staff has reason to believe that some equipment may have been bought and recovered over eBay by an [Office of Inspector General] investigator."
The CDC no longer leases that particular warehouse, the letter said, and now stores equipment in a more secure facility that is guarded 24-hours a day.
The last time the inspector general's office audited CDC's oversight of its equipment was in 1995, the congressmen said. At that time, the CDC's missing property list had just 648 items worth $1.6 million.
"The inspector general needs to completely and immediately audit the CDC property management system to stop the bleeding of taxpayer-owned property," Barton said Tuesday. "In cases of theft, we also need to know what's happened to the thieves."
