Editorial: Just the ticket?

Wednesday, April 25, 2007 | 7:09 a.m.

T he government spends about $250 million annually to provide transit passes to 300,000 federal employees nationally. The program is meant to encourage the use of public transportation and to cut down on fuel use, air pollution and traffic congestion.

But a congressional report has revealed instances of federal employees who, rather than using the transit passes, have instead illegally sold them over the Internet .

The Government Accountability Office, the investigating arm of Congress, says that in just three days investigators found 58 online sales offers for the transit passes and confirmed that at least 20 of them had been posted by federal employees. Selling the passes is illegal, the GAO says.

Employees in the Washington, D.C., area alone defraud the government of about $17 million a year, the GAO says, adding that it investigated only that region and that the employees "are likely the tip of a much larger number of violations of the law."

In one example, GAO investigators posing as online buyers paid an Air Force captain $350 for $420 worth of transit passes. The captain, using his military e-mail, said he would arrive at the meeting site "in his Air Force service dress uniform," the report says.

A Commerce Department employee received transit passes for five years after she quit working for the government. And one federally employed couple netted $6,000 through 61 online sales.

The main problem is that there are no government wide controls for the program and virtually no oversight in the agencies themselves, the GAO says. This is outrageous. Congress should demand that strict fraud controls are enacted across the government, and federal agencies must heed the GAO's findings and refuse to tolerate this illegal practice .